Near the end of March, my grandmother entered a critical condition. Eventually, she went into a coma and died the next day.
She spent 2.5 weeks in a state that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Throughout the entire period parts of her brain were shutting down to the point where she lost the ability to recognize any of us and was constantly teleporting herself somewhere.
2.5 weeks don’t sound like a lot, but they felt like an eternity to us. I can undoubtedly say that her state was worse than death.
All my other grandparents are dead too, but their deaths didn’t shake me as much because I was much younger and there was no insanity involved.
I will not explain the entirety of the situation because you will have to be a part of my family to fully understand it. And to be honest, I don’t think I have the power to do so right now.
However, I still wanted to use this energy, as negative as it may be, to make a post on suffering.
Here’s what I learned from this experience (so far):
1. Ultimately, life = pain/suffering
You can try to be as positive as you want, but you can’t change the fact that suffering is the main theme in life, and you will find it everywhere.
Some suffer a lot more than others, but we all receive our dose. You can’t get through life without feeling tears going down your face.
The positive thinkers will argue that suffering is necessary for pleasure to exist because you can’t have light without darkness (dualism).
It’s true. But suffering dominates and has a stronger effect on one’s character than joy.
2. Long Life Is A Brutal Punishment
My grandmother would have been 93 in November. She lived through WW2, saw all kinds of regimes and governments come and go, grew up in misery….etc.
As an adult, she lost a child, witnessed the death of her parents and husband and unfortunately, her life ended in a non-dignified way because her mental capacity was completely destroyed.
Ultimately, long life is nothing but extended suffering.
3. A Long Life Doesn’t Guarantee Extreme Development
It may sound a little harsh, and you may judge me negatively for it, but I’ll be honest.
Some people have only 1/3 of my grandmother’s lifespan and yet accomplish a lot more in the material and spiritual world.
If I have to be as objective as possible, I have to admit that she was a little too caught in the baser things in life.
4. In times of extreme pain, you find God.
A wise man once told me: “God wants you to suffer because He loves you.”
A contradicting claim, isn’t it? If God loves you, why would He want you to suffer?
Because we seek God only when we’re in pain.
When the drama started, I was hopeless. There was nothing we could do. Ditto for the doctors. We bought all the drugs that they told us to, but there were zero results. She was getting worse every day. Neither of us was sleeping more than 1-2 hours. The medics refused to accept her in a hospital due to the lack of space and nurses.
I didn’t know what to do so I went to the river and prayed. The prayer was as honest as it gets. My entire body was shivering.
I wouldn’t have done any of this if I had the life of a rich Chad who always “wins”.
When you’re blooming, you don’t think about God. You seek him only when you’re in pain.
5. The worst things in life come when you don’t expect them.
Bad things may happen to you when you anticipate them, but the absolute worst moments in your life are always a complete surprise.
6. Life can crush just about anyone.
I don’t care about the ideology that you subscribe to…whether you’re a “red pill” guy, MGTOW, alpha, beta…whatever. I also don’t care about your deadlift and squat numbers.
Life will crush you sooner or later. We can pretend that everything that happens to us is solely the result of our actions and “mindset”, but it’s not.
When life really hits you, all the self-help pseudo-science and positives memes vanish.
7. Life is Scarier Than Death
At first, I didn’t know how long my grandmother will suffer. I thought that the pain may last weeks, months, or maybe even a year because she was surprisingly strong for her age.
And that thought devastated me because she was in very bad shape.
When she died, I was relieved because the suffering was over. There was nothing sad about her death. She’d lived a full life.
The weeks before her death, however, were multiple times scarier.
8. I’ve been holding back.
Moments like this push you to cross frontiers that you were afraid of before.
I’ll be honest with you. I feel like I’ve been too soft in my writing. I’ve been holding back. I’ve been too kind to people and ideologies that don’t deserve my kindness.
9. Seeing the suffering of people you love hits you the hardest.
The story made me sad on multiple levels.
I was sad about my grandmother.
I was sad about myself.
I was sad about life in general
…
but the pain that really crushed me was seeing my mother suffer.
My mother is the person on this Earth that I love and will love the most. Seeing her cry over the body of my grandmother stabbed me inside.
10 . Appreciate what you have
If you’ve been reading my writings for a while, you probably know that I’m cursed when it comes to finding “love”.
I’ve turned the world upside down to find someone, but all my attempts failed.
But guess what? Every single day throughout those 2.5 weeks, I wanted to teleport myself to the times when I was approaching women on the street only to get rejected and humiliated.
Why? Because even those days appeared like a holiday compared to what I was witnessing at home.
Sometimes you think that you have it bad even though your life is practically heaven compared to what’s about to come. Smile while you still can.
11. To me, life is predetermined
You can disagree, but to me, life is entirely pre-determined. You have a destiny that you can’t run from. It’s all pre-written. We just don’t know how the story ends.
Blessings brother
I don’t think i have words that could reach to you and relieve some of the pain in your heart nor the weight in your shoulders. However, I’d like you to know this, many of us find in you a reflection of ourselves. We too have been “black-pilled”, we know the state the world is in, and how life has little to no reward for many of us. Yet, we keep struggling, and seeing how other too struggle with life, and don’t give up give us the strength to keep going. You’re such of those people, keep struggling, as we have nothing left, I hope from the botton of my heart that you can find even a temporary happyness that makes life worth it.
Thank your for the support, Roboto. It’s too early to quit. We will keep going.
It’s very strange that life means suffering, but most of us still want to live. Why is that? Life is still worth living?
Sorry for your loss..Stay strong and remember, Neither Sadness nor Joy lasts..
Thank you for the support, Jay.
I agree. Life is made of circles of pain within circles of joy within circles of pain…etc.
Sorry for your loss Truth. Keep your head up as best you can.
Thank you for the support, Berserk. I will try to keep going.
Sorry for your loss brother!
I have followed your work for years and always will. Strange as it sounds but I do believe this will take you to the next level.
Stay blessed.
Thank you for the support, Robert.
Pain seems to be the greatest teacher.
Sorry Truth for the comment I made in the previous post I didn’t know you were in so much pain.
You deserve happiness as much as anybody. If it helps at all, your posts have been a comfort to me for a long time.
You are wise and have helped alot of people find some truth. I can’t say you haven’t help shape my thought process because you have.
The bible says that the wiser you are the more sorrow we will experience and the more knowledge we possess the more grief.
Is it better in hindsight to be ignorent and unaware of pain and suffering? I don’t know. But in this life we can’t turn back, thats all I do know.
Thank you for the support, Brett. I see nothing wrong with your comment. I value your opinion a lot too.
Lo siento. Ojalá puedas entender esto.
Thank you for the support, Eduardo. I used Google translate to read your message.
Mi más sentido pésame
eres increíble , tus post me han sido de gran ayuda, como una compañía en los momentos difíciles, animo
Thank you for the support, Teto. I used Google translate to translate your message.
Sorry for your loss, I really am. I come back to your site every so often and enjoy the truth of it. At 62 I’m surprised I’m not dead, close calls but lucky I guess. We are all blessed and cursed at the same time, no doubt about. You can’t just Tony Robbins your way to a perfect life. I see your gift is that of observation and thought put into action & experimentation with a final conclusion or analysis that is both honest, heartfelt and without commercialism. You are gifted! I learned it best from a turtle cartoon character from the 1960’s called Tuttle the Turtle. The Wizard always told him a quote that went something like this. ” be what you is and not what you’re not, those that do that are the happiest lot.” Stay strong! Dan.
My mum died last August unexpectedly at age 72. It was Idiosyncratic Pulmonary Fibrosis so it was just her lungs hardened and they couldn’t do anything. She was starting to get the effects of old age but definitely was in good shape and very active. Her parents died well into their 90’s so I just assumed she would be around for another 20 years. But she was wonderful while she was with us and I am so grateful to The Lord she was my mum. As sad as it is that she is gone, I still remember without any fading, how much she loved me. But watching her take her final breaths is not something I want to remember.
Her death actually made me realise how much impact love and care has on others. One person threw up, my ex mother in law went to pieces. I never knew that just being loving to those around could have such an impact.
I hope that you have awesome memories of your Grandma….and you cherish any love that is given to you.
Thank you for the support, Rob.
I am sorry to hear about your mother. And I can only imagine the pain of losing her.
Thankfully, she lived a full life and had a great deal of people who loved her with their souls.
Nothing can take away the memories and proximity that you had/have. In a way, she is not really dead.
Sorry for your loss, brother.
I agree with your thoughts, and may add that strength is the sole thing that keeps us going forward. So I wish us all, strength.
Thank you for the support, André. I will try to be strong.
Sorry for your loss man. You have a lot of people that support you and care about your well being. Your writings have helped many of us get through tough times and have shown us truth in a world full of lies. Please don’t stop writing and don’t give up. Stay strong brotha.
Thank you for the support, Joe.
People like you keep me going.
I have to agree on all your points. A long time back, I have come to similar conclusions. Started to ask if life itself is worth to live or is it better not to exists at all if all we have is suffering with sprinkles of happiness (as deadpool said).
“You grow old long enough to become the villain” they say… Maybe you understand some of the villains against life more. And whats the point in all these anyway right?
Thank you for the support, Limatog.
There’s also another similar quote that says:
“As kids we love heroes, as adults we understand villains.”
Sorry for ur loss and I agree with much of what u said but i dont think life is just suffering. I think it tends to balance out and the human mind has incredible adaptive capabilities. Also whether or not ur a rich chad who wins all the time isnt rlly gonna keep people from dying. Whether or not life is predetermined, i mean we’ll never know so it doesnt rlly matter.
I think it’s matter if life is predetermined or not. The problem is that we don’t know the end of the story.
Last week I heard a story about a man who wanted to be surgeon. He struggled 10 years to become one. Guess want! He had an accident, loses his hand or something like that and his dream was ended! I FUCKING HATE LIFE, but in the same time, I don’t know why I want to live so bad. 🙁
Thank you for the support, Entity.
It’s true. The idea of a shape-shifting Chad who never experiences pain is just an exaggeration. All people get to experience their fair share of difficult moments to grow.
—–
Yes. Practically speaking, it doesn’t matter that life is pre-determined because you don’t know how, and therefore, you may live it as if every choice you make is the result of your free will.
But in reality, it’s not. For better or worse, we are on a train.
Hey btw about ur romantic struggles I tried lsd recently and it p much killed any desire i had for love and/or sex, altho it kinda makes u lonely cuz it removes many aspects of ur humanity. Just putting it out there tho it could prob help with ur loss as well.
Sorry for your loss. Also english is not my native language and I’m a bad storyteller. But I want you to know this.
I had similar condition. My dad was 71, got stroke, 2 weeks later got gangrene on his leg, it get worse and amputated his leg a month after. All my family cried to think how scary the amputation process. I even become paranoid to sugar and sweet food. 8 months later he got heavy breathing and died on the next day. Around the same time I read the news about a chinese 38 year old bodybuilder got stroke too.
So I thought, it doesnt matter if you young, old, fat or muscular in the end we’ll get the suffering lottery.
Just 2 months after my dad’s death all my family got coronavirus. My mom got fever, headache, sweating, sore mouth, puke everyday.
She even texted faith healer to help her, but he just replied: ‘go to hospital if you have money ma’am ‘ and send how to charity video. Heartless Scammer.
Then my mom insist to stay at home because she afraid she can’t meet me, my sibling and died alone in hospital. See, suffering days once again. Luckily she recover.
My body quite muscular(natural), eat healthy food, lift weight 3 days a week and cardio weekly. But covid gave me fever, throat pain, anosmia, severe cough and chest
pain for 3 weeks. However my brother who is 2 years younger than me, obese, huge belly, shower once in 5 days, never workout, eat anything, got non-symptom covid. Not
fair. Then I realize, its just like you said that calf size is genetic, so is my covid symptoms. I just got bad genetic and no workout nor healthy food can improve my condition to prevent it
Now you see that my mind already shattered with all the disease, religious scam, workout, living healthy promises, good karma bullshit (I found a phone at gym, gave it
back to the owner and next month my phone got stolen, see?).
I also stop looking for God, pray for better things or fairness and despise toxic positivity people. I just want peace to spend the rest of my life.
Till I found some ancient Buddha teaching (no I’m not promoting some religion, teaching nor atheism here, but this really helped me realize) to stop pray, stop religious ritual, stop thinking unfairness, stop asking ‘why me’, stop hoping good karma. Because all of them will just torture your soul further. Pray and hope do comforting on some people but in reality it never promise anything. Instead just accept everything that happen in your life, fix if it can be fixed, learn to move on, enjoy anything that you could enjoy today.
(yes those ancient teaching surprisingly contradict with the recent and more popular ones but I dont care because it more make sense to my life also help me to swallow all the painful reality and move on )
Thank you for the support, Barry. I am sorry for your painful period.
But even in your writings, I can feel that it has already helped you evolve into a stronger individual.
In the end, we all pass through hell sooner or later.
Dear Truth Seeker,
I am sorry for your loss. Although, I’m yet to experience this kind of pain. People that I really love are still alive – but the clock is ticking…
The only soul ripping experience I had was when my wife left me. Almost three years of gut-wrenching sleepless despair. I guess one could count it as a death – a double death – of sanctity, love.
I can double down on everything you wrote. You know, Russians have a proverb: There are no atheists in the trenches.
Funny about predetermination of life. Indeed, so may factors predetermine our outcomes and chances. As Agatha Christie’s Poirot once said in the episode Five Little Pigs, after hearing about a ‘rich genious’ – a young man who inherited a family fortune while being a talented painter:
“It is surprising, is it not, how soon in life the die is cast?”
I feel that at least ten percent of our life is not predetermined. But it doesn’t mean it’s under your total control, either. Luck — opportunities, chances, being in the right time at the right place, social context, right ideas in the right situation with just the right people…connections etc. It’s totally random.
Thank you for the support, Brankezz.
I’m sorry that she left you. For what it’s worth, I doubt you did anything wrong. If the separation has touched you so much, you truly loved her.
You’ve probably heard of the MGTOW saying: “You can understand women or love them, but you can’t do both.”
I hope you’re doing better now.
Please accept my condolences.
I have been reading your blog for over five years and always empathized with your texts which brilliantly express preoccupations among common western folks of our times like me.
I agree with you about life’s determinacy, although the thought always puzzles me. There is clearly evolution in a man’s life, but everything that happens always seems so inevitable.
Thank you for the support, Alambo.
I’m sorry for your loss, Truth Seeker. I also went through this process years algo with the loss of some close relatives. This naturally lead us to think about our situation as mortal, suffering beings. I hope I can share a great source of knowledge that helped me, the philosophy of Schopenhauer. Your text have close agreement with it, specially the first and last point, as he affirms that
“Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life, our existence must entirely fail of its aim. It is absurd to look upon the enormous amount of pain that abounds everywhere in the world, and originates in needs and necessities inseparable from life itself, as serving no purpose at all and the result of mere chance. Each separate misfortune, as it comes, seems, no doubt, to be something exceptional; but misfortune in general is the rule.”
For more on the sufferings of the world
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10732
For a way out
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10741/
I hope you get through it stronger and wiser.
Thank you for the support, P-S.
I will look into those books.
True religious conversion, feeling that most honest communion with god through prayer is as important a part of life as falling in love with a woman is. Someone who does not experience that is missing out on the full human experience. Thank you for sharing this with us.
“I feel like I’ve been too soft in my writing. I’ve been holding back. I’ve been too kind to people and ideologies that don’t deserve my kindness.”
I’m looking forward to hearing more, even though I may very well be part of this group, many faults and weaknesses, many ways that I could and should be a better man.
Stay strong brother.
Thank you for the support, MattW.
I wasn’t talking about the readers of the site. I can’t complain about the visitors at all. I’ve received a ton of support over the years from very dedicated NoN fans.
Got the same experience two years ago.
My gf passed away( cancer) and I was by her side until her last breath.
Get well soon, I know how you feel now.
You can do it so take your time.
Sorry for your loss.
Thank for the support, K.
What the hell does this and your recent autistic posts have to do with nattyornot? Nice reddit tier thoughts about “suffering” too… wait.
Blackpill: Stop wearing your heart on your sleeve and kick rocks. People die.
You’re correct. It’s technically off topic.
Some youtube survivalist whom I watch said something like, “I’m not tough. The real tough ones are the ones who go to mental and physical edge because they have no choice.”
It’s easy to feel tough when you’re young and strong and facing no adversity. But eventually, most of us come up against the cold, hard reality of suffering. It’s a shame we’re not better prepared for it.
https://youtu.be/jyc81tIooZg?t=3395
I had the same thoughts. The guy who said it was right.
So you finally clued in on a bigger picture, it would seem.
Roids, natty, lifts, girls, apha, beta, red pill, blue pill; its all just BS top to bottom. Means nothing. Were in this world for a very short time and all if these things we think matter do not really exist. Everything is just a McGuffin designed to test our character. Pass the test and never come back. Fail the test and return for the rerwrite.
I agree.
Heartily I’m sorry for your loss.
There will always be one idiot like you in every comment section of this blog.
what to say , you made me cry man …
TruthSeeker… A young (under 35 years old) friend of mine lost his YOUNG brah because of cancer. Then he lost his YOUNG father because of cancer too. Then he also got cancer, but hopefully, he got healed with severe chemotherapies. He is now alone with his motha. However, he is smiling, he was obese and set a goal (: to lose unnecessary fat). Indeed, he succeeded. He has lost 35 kgs and he keeps going on in order to lose 5 more kgs. His life is going on and so he does.
He is a stronger man than me.
Thank you for the support, Esteban.
Sorry for your loss. Watching a loved one lose their mind is as awful as it gets. I reluctantly have to agree with you that life is full of suffering. I guess we must somehow find a way of coping with this suffering?
I’m look forward to reading more of your posts and books!
Thank you for the support, Greywolf.
I think she refuses to leave so easily.
Your messages arrives a lot of people you can t imagine. In a way, you dont give up so easily either
life is entirely predetermined? If this is true then there is not good or evil.
Law is false.
Can you explain what you mean?
Predetermined…How did you come to that conclusion?