I find myself stumbling into my favorite haunt again on a Tuesday night - not drunk, but dazed - but then again it’s the most clarity I’ve felt in years. I don’t even drink, just find my way into a secluded corner and gaze out the window onto the street below. If a waiter takes pity on me and offers to bring me something, I’ll order a club soda out of embarrassment. It’s free but I give him a five dollar bill anyway; it would be unthinkable not to do so.

I refuse to let myself slip into the unthinking again.

It is just a matter of time, I tell myself, before I will not be alone. It is a statistical near-certainty that someone will eventually let their guard down enough for me to get close to them - it’s happened before but I did not take the opportunity. I will not make the same mistake again.

I wonder if I would kill myself if I knew for a fact that I would always be alone? I think that would be an awful existence, and certainly it would make life intolerable on its face, but then again I find it equally plausible that I could live a full life in this state - would it be enjoyable? No, not as much as it could be, but no one can have everything in life. Some experiences are simply inaccessible to us.

As long as some implicit hope remains, it is possible to continue.

Hope in spite of life is really the only thing that can possibly ennoble a human life. The undying spirit and will, the yearning for the impossible. If I lose it, it would be better to die. The unsatisfactoriness of life must be always internalized, such that the we retain the sense that life is somehow *improvable*. When the illusion is dispelled - for that is what this notion is, an illusion - life becomes a completely hopeless endeavor, an abject nightmare, and we are reduced to animals that can exert no control over our fates.

I find myself afraid of my own fate, but this is only because my intuition tells me that I can never escape it. I am happy to engage in the collective daydream that we can exercise our wills in order to change the course of our lives, notwithstanding my own deep suspicion of it.

The only path is forward. The answer is not inside yourself. Outward expansion and consumption is the only way. Otherwise you will cannibalize yourself, ruin yourself. Reflection only engenders the hopelessness of reality.

If any hope is to be found, it is without.

Perhaps you will find the same vacancy in incessant action. But I do not see any alternative.