The more I think about it, the more unhappy I become. The more desperate, dissatisfied, dejected, dolorous, doleful, downcast, downhearted, desolate, dispirited and depressed I become (kudos to Roget's Thesaurus). Only the future could be worse than the present (by no great leap of logic) and I dread what the next few years may bring.
Hoping desperately that I'm wrong, my little predictions of gloom are as follows:
1) The current 'bullish' economic outlook will collapse within the next two years. Just in time for me to finish medical school...
2) Global poverty and widening income disparities will continue unabated
3) No major environmental disasters will stem from 'global warming' and 'climate change' - yet politicians and the media will somehow find a way to blame these for hurricanes and earthquakes
I have no happy future. The world (on average, on the whole) has no happy future. It's going to be utterly impossible to find employment, whether meaningful or not. How does it feel at 21 to think that the past two decades have been an utter waste? It sucks. It sucks, bigtime. It totally, utterly sucks. There is no need for eloquence when you can't see the wood from the trees because the whole forest is crumbling around you in a hail of sawdust. There is no need - because you can't tell if you're wielding the chainsaw or whether that's simply the sound of your mind shredding the last elements of your sanity.
My first week in a laboratory has not done this to me. No, no - the lab has been good, so far. However, it has slammed home how utterly useless I am. I put in my 9-6 every day (it'll increase, I assure you, as the experiments progress) and yet I know I'll never feel satisfied with the outcome, constantly worrying about the past, present and future in a blur of anxiety. This is what happens when you're a pampered child loth to untie the deadknots of apron strings for fear of falling into the abyss over which you dangle, saved only by those same apron strings.
This is all one big delusion. The power to deceive oneself seems to be the only thing that can keep a person going, sometimes. It's an elaborate game of make-believe, where you cling to the past, veiling the present horror with the images of what you perceived you could have been just so you can live on to fulfill the tainted promise of a tomorrow that would be better off if it never came.
Hoping desperately that I'm wrong, my little predictions of gloom are as follows:
1) The current 'bullish' economic outlook will collapse within the next two years. Just in time for me to finish medical school...
2) Global poverty and widening income disparities will continue unabated
3) No major environmental disasters will stem from 'global warming' and 'climate change' - yet politicians and the media will somehow find a way to blame these for hurricanes and earthquakes
I have no happy future. The world (on average, on the whole) has no happy future. It's going to be utterly impossible to find employment, whether meaningful or not. How does it feel at 21 to think that the past two decades have been an utter waste? It sucks. It sucks, bigtime. It totally, utterly sucks. There is no need for eloquence when you can't see the wood from the trees because the whole forest is crumbling around you in a hail of sawdust. There is no need - because you can't tell if you're wielding the chainsaw or whether that's simply the sound of your mind shredding the last elements of your sanity.
My first week in a laboratory has not done this to me. No, no - the lab has been good, so far. However, it has slammed home how utterly useless I am. I put in my 9-6 every day (it'll increase, I assure you, as the experiments progress) and yet I know I'll never feel satisfied with the outcome, constantly worrying about the past, present and future in a blur of anxiety. This is what happens when you're a pampered child loth to untie the deadknots of apron strings for fear of falling into the abyss over which you dangle, saved only by those same apron strings.
This is all one big delusion. The power to deceive oneself seems to be the only thing that can keep a person going, sometimes. It's an elaborate game of make-believe, where you cling to the past, veiling the present horror with the images of what you perceived you could have been just so you can live on to fulfill the tainted promise of a tomorrow that would be better off if it never came.
