If life were a gift you could inspect before accepting it, I imagine most people would politely decline. In Sartre’s No Exit, three people are locked in a single room, tormenting each other, each one hell for the others. No wonder Sophocles, Byron, and others believed that never being born at all is the best way out. Schopenhauer said life is like a landscape painting — passable from a distance, but unbearable up close. So what, then, could possibly count as happiness? In truth, happiness in life is an illusion; there is only suffering, and the absence of suffering. Writing this, I seem to be sliding into extreme pessimism, and yet that’s exactly how it is. Faced with these inexplicable moods, we’re better off being pessimistic than being calmly rational about them. Life is this empty, and this absurd, and on top of that absurdity there are always vast numbers of people speaking, acting, and punishing others without the faintest idea what they’re doing. This absurdity isn’t human nature — it’s the nature of nothingness itself: we fear that everything we do will turn out meaningless, and we fear that our goals will dissolve into nothing. And as for what we call “things outside ourselves” — what are they, really? Nothingness, probably, as well.

This track, “The River,” is hazy, ghostly, almost haunted by a grievance that won’t rest. It can’t help but make you wonder: who, exactly, would ever ask for a “gift” like life? (youtube link)