Batteries Not Included

I've woken feeling as low as I felt yesterday and my thoughts have turned again to why most other people's lives seem to work and mine doesn't.

Almost everyone I know isn't given that much to thought - by this I don't mean worrying or longing, but actual systematic thought. They pursue interests, relationships, friendships, careers without much analysis or self-reflection. They hold opinions without deep understanding, express those opinions without self-awareness.

They believe in absurd, even fatuous things such as astrology, or God, or that they have a fate mapped out for them.

And all of these people have lives that work - they have difficulties, but the difficulties mostly resolve and on goes normal fulfilling life.

I'm intelligent and thoughtful. I struggle to make friends, I've struggled to find even menial employment, I've never known how to initiate a loving relationship.

It strikes me that thought and intelligence aren't worth much. Animals don't have much in the way of them, and they live and mate and raise young before they return to the nothing-at-all that we all come from.

Early humans must have had thought and intellect, but beyond knowing what berries and nuts to pick, and how to hunt and bring down an aurochs or a mammoth, everything they believed must have been wrong. And they lived and mated and raised their children before they returned to the earth we are all made from.

I know enough successful people to know they don't do much in the way of thinking, even when they're bright.

Intelligence and thought mustn't be worth much in life, they must be like sharp teeth or sharp claws - natural built-in tools, but no more than that. Obviously emotion and instinct are more important, a will to dominance, a will to action, a will to connect.

I have the tools but in me the important instincts and emotions are faulty, and so the tools are useless to me, and I am useless to myself and others.

And so I fail.

And so I am lonely.

And so I am sad.