I Will Spend My Life Watching Everyone I Come to Love Die Before Me

I have always insisted on facing my pain, my hell, alone. I accepted that it would be useless to involve other people, however well-intentioned they were, because they could never come close to understanding what I was going through or why it affected me. I have never been able to depend on other people to properly empathize with what I was experiencing in my expanding awareness.

But everyone has a breaking point, even exceptional creatures such as me. Finding it just took pushing myself to an absurd distance out of comfort and normality.

Recently, I underwent what was possibly the darkest of dark nights of my soul, brought about by a realization regarding the impermanence of every meaningful relationship from throughout my life. I came to see that no matter how much I worked to improve myself and extend my love and support in the best ways I knew how, this world would never let me enjoy the fruits of my labor for long. Its influence would always win out in the end. It would corrupt the minds of the people I cared about by exploiting their weaknesses, silently entering their souls and taking over as soon as they were weak enough for it to.

If the sacrifice of the authentic self to collective values can be seen as spiritual death, those who remain true to themselves indefinitely are the only immortals. They are fated to outlive everyone around them, everyone they grow close to and bond with for any length of time, because they stay the same while everyone else degrades—killing themselves, in a sense, far too early.

The trope of the lone immortal in a world of fragile mortals perfectly captures the resulting psychological state: a continuity of consciousness across thousands of years or generations where everyone else keeps dying after only several decades. It becomes impossible to meaningfully bond with, trust, or invest in anyone because you know they will leave soon. Only you will remain. This is how it feels to live forever in a world populated by psychological mayflys.

Psychological immortality stems from high intelligence and high self-awareness, combined with a certain arrangement of emotional character. It compels a special someone to seek out universal ideals to identify with above all other fleeting possibilities. Fearlessness and a sense of self-security are key because fear and insecurity would eventually cause someone to abandon the ideals they had been discovering in order to survive (or so it seems to them).

The fact that I have always assumed I was invincible has probably also been an essential factor. It seems psychopathic on the surface: the unshakeable arrogance that you will solve any problem life throws at you and are, thus, impervious to injury. I’m not afraid to die. I only concern myself with living as myself.

But every regular person who is afraid to fully embrace their core identity and destiny is born into a terminal illness that will cut their life tragically short. They will betray themselves and die because they will be tempted to give up on courage, passion, and the heroic drive toward fullest self-expression. Fear, shame, and insecurity will grow stronger and suppress everything they could become under conditions that would support their growth instead of demanding conformity. Only the fearless survive because nothing stops them from exploring the furthest reaches of who they are. They are willing to die to remain true.

Perception of scarcity over what we think we need to survive is what drives our fear and, eventually, our downfall. It’s abstract, invented fear, a kind unique to humans because of our ability to abstractify like no other living creature. We mold ourselves to what we perceive our limits to be. We rarely test those limits for accuracy.

Instinctual fear as a survival mechanism is a good thing when properly applied. It senses when you are in immediate danger and helps you prepare for it. On the other hand, cosmic horror is terror of what is beyond our capacity to perceive or understand. It is different than fear of what we can see and immediately comprehend as dangerous, such as wild predators with clearly displayed signs of their capacity to harm us. Their danger and how to survive it are known.

Somewhere beyond that is the general fear of the unknown. Perhaps you know that something can hurt you, but you don’t know exactly what it is or how it will hurt you. Mystery and suspense heighten its power. That’s why every great monster movie takes its time in showing its beast in full glory, generally only hinting at what it is and what it’s capable of until the climax of the story.

But the most abstract horror denies your capacity to deal with it entirely because it convinces you that it is beyond the realm of the possible and comprehensible. That makes it unbeatable, and only a matter of time before it weakens otherwise well-defended minds. You have to be absolutely immune to abstract fears to remain true to yourself and your principles. So long as you fear no existential threats, you cannot be controlled.

The only true consistency in my life is me. I am my own only guarantee. My experience of myself is my closest eternal companion. And that’s why I have spent my life striving to be someone I can stand to be around, because I will always be there haunting myself. When everything and everyone else falls away at the end of the universe, it will just be me.

I have never known a person besides myself who could remain consistent when it was the hardest thing to do. I don’t have any reason to think any other immortals exist. Or if they do, they are probably so rare that I cannot find them while I am here. I have to endure because I am the only permanence that I will ever know. Everything and everyone else will falter and die, no matter how important they become to my comfort or sense of identity.

The probability is that I will spend the rest of my life coming to love people who will, sooner or later, abandon the higher parts of themselves that I bond with. I cannot stay attached to them without it breaking me. Yet, getting attached to them is the only thing that makes my experience of life worthwhile. I am condemned to a state of existence that I cannot share with others. And with each of them that dies, a part of me goes with them.

I’m not talking about people naturally growing apart, which can be an expression of their authentic values at certain times in their lives. I’m talking about the sudden, catastrophic severing of a close bond and shared sense of identity due to an implosion of compounding emotional weaknesses that cause undeveloped people to betray their cores—people who become the very opposite of what they once proclaimed themselves as and promised to be.

I am in a constant state of mourning over those I have lost. Perhaps I always will be, and I will only add those yet to come. Even now, I mourn those I have yet to lose because I can expect with a high degree of confidence that they are next. And then, so too will be the people I have not even met yet but will eventually bond with for a fleeting time before disaster.

In a flat character arc, a paragon, who is already the functional embodiment of their ideals, does not really change throughout the story. They don’t need to. Their change was about getting to where they are now. Instead, the world around them changes because they refuse to. Their only challenge is refusing to change when the world tries to compel them.

“Republics are founded on one principle above all else: The requirement that we stand up for what we believe in, no matter the odds or consequences. When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth and tell the whole world: ‘No, you move.’”

—Mark Twain