My line of thinking is approaching something dangerously close to, but not quite, nihilism. It’s difficult even for me to draw together enough threads to weave this into something coherent, but the basic ideas are:

-If you want anything, it doesn’t matter what it is, because even if you get what you want, you’ll replace your want with another thing that you don’t have.
-Wanting anything keeps your fundamental Being in a state of Wanting, not Having.
-All you can have is all that you do have.
-Which makes you utterly helpless.

The mind cannot do. Only the body is capable of doing, and if the body is put into an unpleasant or dangerous situation, it will instantly react to get out of that situation. The body is almost (but not quite) deaf to the mind’s sufferings, desires and needs: it reacts to these subtly, with depression, anxiety, loneliness, higher blood pressure, and shorter life span. So wanting, a product of mind, is utterly useless, even detrimental, in life. Instead, it would be better to shift into a state of having. By this I don’t mean “being happy with what you have,” but actually accepting that all you have, all you know, and all you’ve experienced is, probably, all there is or at least all you are going to get. Only by redefining “you,” or ideas about the self, does this get us out of almost-nihilism. And even then, retaking a broader sense of self in the present world is unimaginably difficult, after the gradual and systematic (and intentional) breakdown of the tribal unit, the extended family, and now even the actual family. To redefine our sense of self in a broader spectrum requires other humans out there doing the same.

In other news, I’ve recently bought a new computer that I have not actually had a chance to use yet because I’ve been too busy trying to fix the million and one problems I have had with it right out of the box. Some part of me in the back of my head privy to primitivism and the critique of civilization is drawing a parallel to the fall of any civilization: as civilization “progresses,” the added complexity to the structure makes it gradually more unstable, and more and more of our time is spent simply trying to hold the whole thing together instead of letting it fall and creating a functional, living society again.