Discontentment

I am not depressed. I am not even sad. But I feel discontentment. And even this, I don’t feel all the time. Maybe half of my day sees me content. And the other half sees me discontent.

What am I discontented regarding. I don’t know. What I do know is that there are moments during the day when all my ideas, beliefs, certainties, my entire personality itself, fall away. They don’t come crumbling down. It’s not that drastic. But rather they seem to simply detach and float in space, establishing a comfortable distance from the identity to which they were thought to belong to. Or, is it my identity that detaches from them? I can’t tell. Am I trying to hold on to them as they make themselves strange and unfamiliar? Or are they trying to latch on to me as I lose my investment in them?

Either way, I feel severed from the world. There is nothing that establishes me in relation to the world, because the foundations upon which I have built that relationship itself are no longer firmly beneath me. Sure, the duality doesn’t exist. There is no me in relation to the world. And this is supposed to be quite blissful. When the “I” merges with nature. But this discontentment isn’t that.

Instead it brings with it a lack of meaning. A lack of will. A lack of vitality. And it is all the more disconcerting because I thought I had formed a good enough foundation upon which I could view and interact with the external world. But in these moments, I’m not sure how to do so. I thought I knew how to feel connected to people. I thought I knew what to do in order to feel purposeful. I thought I had the ideas and beliefs that would inform my behaviour and decisions at every moment. I thought I was close to understanding nature of reality.

But in these moments, I know nothing. I’m suspended in a vacuum of uncertainty. And suddenly everything becomes stupid. Absurd. Pointless. And I wonder what use are my ideas and my knowledge, my moral code and my values. If they aren’t able to support me in the exact moments when I feel disconnected, then what reason do I have to feel proud of them? If all they can do is support my ego when it basks in its moments of glory, aren’t they simply a sort of ornamentation? That which glitter in the radiance of certainty. But unable to sparkle even slightly in these moments of listlessness.

Does everyone feel this way? Am I only pretending to be certain? Am I only pretending to find meaning in what I do, even when I deem it to be meaningless during the moments when I am most alone. Do I truly connect with people, or am I just trying to find the most polite and agreeable way in which I can escape a social situation before I start to feel a sort of resentment and disinterest towards those very people.

Such a facade. It even fools me. I thought I am authentic. But I simply picked out a facade of authenticity. It looks so much like the real thing.