Drifting - 60

I feel like I am drifting. My life is spiralling through space-time, back and fourth through externally-induced habits, routines, decisions, successes, failues, tasks. Everything is a task. I've divided everything into meaningless little bits of dust that come together to form a whole that is, unfortunately, the sum of its parts. Everything is a task for me to complete, even things that I've taken on as 'fun side projects'. Life has four parts: completing these tasks, consuming things that I won't remember later, sleeping, and socializing. While I am, one might say, 'in control', that too remains meaningless to me.

Over the past year, I have been surviving by turning inward, trying to organize my life and learn. The two are related; trying to build a knowledge base for myself requires a high degree of organization. I have gotten pleasure from reading tutorials, soaking up knowledge especially about computer science and productivity. My problem is now that this too feels meaningless to me, just another time sink and surface-level pleasure as my finite time ticks away...

My learning only feels superficial. It frustrates me immensely, and makes any learning that I do feel arbitrary and disconnected. Such may simply be the plight of a mediocre generalist. I wish I could specialize, have some unrelenting passion for one thing in particular that I could hone and build upon, form an identity around, find enjoyment in, all that; I could follow a sort-of linear path along the line of humanity's collective knowledge, and maybe even contribute along the way. Rather, I am bouncing around aimlessly.

I am not yet in college, and my current school is a pretty good environment. I want to enjoy it as much as I can, take advantage of everything that I can. I want to make friends, meet mentors, learn a lot, and most of all enjoy life. I am preparing to take an extremely heavy courseload next year, because... knowledge? To summarize: I have no fucking idea what I'm doing and life is passing me by.

Everything is just returning to my sense of abject meaninglessness. I do believe that I have a purpose - to aid in the development of human civilization and increase global well-being as much as possible - and that is most likely going to be the goal that I pursue for the rest of my life. The thing is, it is my belief systems and rationality that tell me to pursue this goal, putting it on the same level as everything else, just as meaningless, just as unfulfilling, as the rest of my life.

Things often feel hopeless when I look around. I can tell myself that 'authoritarianism is inherently more unstable than democracy' and that 'good historically prevails over evil, long-term' but it doesn't help me much in the face of, say, ongoing genocide, war, and mass starvation across the globe and the polarization, corruption, and incompetence going on at home.

It makes me wonder: how do people deal with the world? I know that religion is one answer, but considering the rise of secularism and the decline of religion (especially in urban environments) there must be a relatively sizeable amount of people facing what I am currently.

Anyway, I'll end it here. I usually get like this as the night winds on and I get tired - not sure if it is more or less representative of my true feelings. Sorry to blast you in the face with seven paragraphs of hopeless word-spewing. A note to my future self, undoubtedly reading this sometime in the future: sorry my writing is cringe.

In pursuit of meaning,
-branches