I have been an honest person. My incentives of death mostly come from lying to myself.

       I am tired of justifying my decisions using the vocabulary of others. I sell the claim that I pursue math and physics because they promise an easy entry into engineering or finance, thus well-paid occupations and a successful life. I sell the claim that interning at a quantum lab is a good choice because it is what draws the investments. Many scientists wrap their wishes in the phrase “the next productivity revolution” that governments and firms love to hear.

       I remember a day when I said I wish to study philosophy along side physics. My father thought for a while and said, maybe that’s helpful because knowing philosophy makes better managers. He thought philosophy is the art of managing people or in other words, something akin to politics.

       It would be a shame if I admitted that it is about On the Height of Despair.

       I do not intend to write another boring complaint of not being born as a rich, well-connected, privileged white male and thus needing to cast myself into a wonderfully useful screwdriver in this society as a factory. I am tired of walking into a room with sofas, tissue papers and a sandbox, explaining what is it about math theories but grades and expectations, then my doubts swept away to a corner and I receive a list of my good character traits and finally, leave me again to resort to making lies and selling them.

       Sometimes I do not leave bed because the things I am going to do after I get up are not that important after all, they are simply productive.

       I have always remembered a funny speculation from a history book. It says that the Agricultural Revolution is not a bless for the human race at all: people spend less time partying and singing, more time bending their backs to work in a field. The diet became less nutritious as well. With all the cost only one benefit: the society supported more lives, basically less children get buried.

       I despise many people, too many. Not unexpectedly, I also despise myself, deeply. Why can’t I just love everyone and myself? We are all very worthy of love because by the conspiracy of nature and men we are thrown into this world and must bear our desires, endless. My greatest enemy: the desire to understand myself and be on good terms with myself. Another enemy: the desire to know, to explain and to justify.

       Even if I sit under the Bodhi Tree, still I cannot get enlightened.

I quote the beloved E. M. Cioran again:

“

Bring every man to the agony of life's last moments by whip, fire, or injections, and through terrible torture he will undergo the great purification afforded by a vision of death. Then free him and let him run in a fright until he falls exhausted. I warrant you that the effect is incomparably greater than any obtained through normal means. If I could, I would drive the entire world to agony to achieve a radical purification of life; I would set a fire burning insidiously at the roots of life, not to destroy them but to give them a new and different sap, a new heat. The fire I would set to the world would not bring ruin but cosmic transfiguration. In this way life would adjust to higher temperatures and would cease to be an environment propitious to mediocrity. And maybe in this dream, death too would cease to be immanent in life.

(These lines written today, April 8, 1933, when I turn twenty-two. It is strange to think that I am already a specialist in the question of death.)

“