How To Get Out of Coping With The Existential Horror of Your Purposeless Life

A lot of needless thought tends to go into the "important" questions in life. "Why are we here?" "What is my purpose?" "Is there a god?" For most people, knowing The Meaning of Life isn't going to change anything. Sure, Slovenly Joe The Racist Plumber might get a kick out of knowing life on earth was seeded by aliens as some kind of grand experiment, but this information is not going to change the way he spends his Saturday nights (splayed out nude on the couch sucking on a tube of raw cookie dough as Judge Judy reruns flicker on the TV).

So why waste precious time and brain cycles considering these unanswerable hypotheticals when there are far more important problems in the world to be considered, such as "Can using a public toilet give you AIDs?", "Where the hell did all these spiders come from?" or "When does the next Chuckie movie come out?"
 
So, in accordance with a new initiative I've been undertaking lately (to write more opening paragraphs which may at first seem as if they are related to the article at hand but under further scrutiny are revealed to be little more than a lazy way to take up space while avoiding having to write something which is actually insightful or useful in any way), I present to you: The article below these words (or: Ways to Deal Your With Life if You're Depressed).
 

I think it's important to begin with suicide, if only to point out that it is not, in fact, a valid coping mechanism. To be honest, it's actually more of a cop out. Plenty of depressed people have felt that blowing their brains all over a wall was their only escape, but I often wonder if these people haven't fully considered all the alternatives. Because truthfully, nowadays there are plenty of better ways than suicide to deal with the pain of your worthless life. Ways like:
 

This may seem far-fetched, but thousands of people do it every day! You'd be surprised at how easy it is to take the negative energy which normally would have been channeled into not getting out of bed all day and using it to commit a hate crime. Other popular options include Developing a vague distrust of Asians, An Irrational and Baseless Hatred of Dark-Skinned Blacks, and Fostering a Latent Fear of Gays Stemming From Strong Homosexual Urges You've Subconsciously Recognized in Yourself and Repressed).
 
You'll be getting out of the house, keeping yourself busy, and meeting plenty of like-minded people, and what could be better for a depressed person? So while this method may not be even remotely moral, it can go a long way towards giving your life meaning. And frankly, it can be pretty satisfying too!
 

 
Most doctors nowadays are more than happy to pump you full of drugs. So if you're feeling depressed there's really no reason not to pay a visit to the clinic. Antidepressants are effective, but they aren't your only choice. A lot of the casual junkies I know have scored some pretty good pharmaceuticals simply by complaining to their physician.
 
Now unfortunately I'm no expert on obtaining pharmaceuticals illicitly (contrary to what the large photo of pills in header image of this website would suggest) but if you were so inclined, you could probably purchase them on the street. Alternatively, you might try developing some chronic lower back pain (for which a doctor might prescribe muscle relaxants) or similar pain-related and not easily proven illnesses for some hydrocodone. And if you happen to be suicidal and living in California, you'll probably be able to get yourself a script for some medicinal marijuana. I'm sure you'd have a lot more fun with that than you would sobbing naked in an empty bathtub as it slowly fills with your own blood.
 

Socrates said "An unexamined life is not worth living." Obviously this is crap. The real truth is that an unexamined life is a happy life.

Sure, it may be a false happiness, and even people who have chosen not to investigate the reason for their existance will still experience the crushing bouts of gnawing emptiness and ego-exploding doubt which living in an uncaring universe can create in one's soul, but it doesn't happen to them nearly as often as it does to philosophy majors.

Yes, I think you'll find that in the long run what you lose in satisfaction of knowing the true nature of the gaping, existential void that is existence will be returned to you tenfold in peace of mind you'll gain from blissful ignorance.
 
 

It's easy to see the allure of this game. Just compare these scenarios and I think you'll begin to see how the simulated version of life in a fictional universe can be so alluring to social misanthropes and borderline personality cases.
 

In Real Life...	In Warcraft...
Attractive People Have Distinct Social Advantages	Most Peers Are Doppelgangers, Coolness Instead Judged By Possession of Swords & Various Articles Of Clothing
Preparing and Eating Food Wastes Precious Time Which Could Be Spent Mindlessly Clicking on Arbitrary Number of Wild Boars	Can Simply Pour Slurry of Tyson Chicken Nuggets and Mountain Dew Down Own Throat Without Rising From Chair
Must Take Time Out From Busy Schedule to Play With Own Children	"Fuck Those Kids, I'm Clicking This Dwarf Some More It's Satisfying"
Meaningful Interactions With Other Humans All But Unavoidable	Meaningful Interactions of Any Kind Nearly Impossible, Other Humans Reduced to Easily Muted Avatars
Month-Long Marathons of Mouse Clicking Result In Paycheck	Month-Long Marathons of Mouse Clicking Result In Monthly Fee, Aching Sadness
Must get up and walk 30 feet to use the restroom.	Urine bottle and an excrement sock will suffice.
Friends & Family Always There To Help	Friends & Family Have Given Up Trying to Contact You (Have Successfully Freed Self From the Constraints of Worldly Relationships)

Obviously I'm not going to get too deep with this one, but let's just say that if life were a videogame, non-religious people would be playing an open-world, goal-free, make-your-own-fun type game  and religious people would be playing an  (you know, like World of Warcraft...)
 
The atheist version of the game throws you into the world and says "Well, you're on your own, figure this shit out. Oh and by the way, once you reach level 80, the game ends forever and everything you've managed to accomplish will mean nothing. Have fun!"
 
In contrast, the religious version of life (Warcraft), knows that for players to be satisfied and happy they've got to give them concrete goals. So they do (organize a church picnic, firebomb sixteen abortion clinics, stone a homosexual to death, etc). Over the course of their virtual lives, if they complete enough of these goals, they're promised a reward: A free lifetime membership in another (theoretically) better game.

In this game (Heaven) everything you could possibly ever want is given to you the moment you wish for it and nobody is ever sad or afraid. So most of the time I would assume you just sit around playing a harp and listening to all your dead relatives babble mindlessly (which to be frank, seems like a pretty crap reward to me, but hey, what do I know). The point is that most players in the religious game are going to be far happier, even if in the end of their lives it turns out that heav--err I mean the "free game"--never even existed.  
 
It would be the ultimate scam: The higher-ups collect their monthly fee, and by the time the suckers figure it out the reward they were promised doesn't exist, they're too dead to complain.
 
I wonder why nobody ever thought to try out this model in the real world.
 

 
Photo Credits
[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]