THE BREAKUP SYNDROME.

Plunged into Nihilism:

There’s an inherent sense of an expectation of justice in us — that somehow Good will be rewarded and the Bad, punished. I’m not particularly religious but if there is a divine being acting as a Guardian of Justice, how could He turn a blind eye to this horrible injustice?

No matter how truly and deeply I love someone, the whole universe isn’t going to conspire to join me and her — is something I learnt the hard way.

Much to our own peril, right from a young age, we’re subconsciously bought into the unspoken notion in most books and movies — that two people just by the virtue of “true love” between them, will always and against all odds, end up together, get married and live happily ever after. How foolish of us!

I couldn’t believe that in only a few days she could not only leave me, but get married to another man. It’s almost impossible to trust another person again when you’ve had this kind of backstab experience from the person you loved and trusted the most. I thought, if SHE could do this to me, how can I ever trust anyone ever again? I spiralled down into a state of disbelief, distrust and nihilism.

The manner in which she chose to leave me — without a word or hint shook the very foundations of my faith in the “goodness of humanity”. She not only took herself — my love away from me, she took away my faith in the very concept of love too.

I felt mocked and fooled for believing in love. May be I shouldn’t have invested my feelings; Perhaps I should have been superficial and just used her for pastime pleasure like most people in relationships do.

Sleepless nights, pacing on the terrace, replaying the events, thinking about what could have been done differently and how this could have been avoided.

Everything seemed at once, empty and meaningless. I started rationalizing that there’s no God, no meaning, and no purpose. I thought we’re just a bag of flesh and bones in an indifferent, meaningless universe that is dead and numb to the injustices and inequalities of life.

You tend to tell yourself that your purpose in life is just to try and extend your lifespan as much as possible, and replicate yourself as much as you could. Dopamine becomes the deity you worship. Everything else, morality and ethics are merely social constructs — or so it seemed.

I was telling myself that there’s no such thing as good or bad. That there will be no punishments or rewards to our actions, in this world or the next, that no one cares, and that in the end, it doesn’t even matter.

All of this culminated to plunge me into a state of moral nihilism — the rejection of all religious and moral principles; A belief that life is, simply put, meaningless.

After all, what value do our feelings and emotions have, if we’re merely a “bunch of chemicals walking in flesh bags”

Nihilism was enticing initially — it numbed my pain, but only at the cost of taking away every little happiness that’s left in my life. The more I adopted it, the more empty I felt inside.

Although the torturous pain forced me to grow calluses in my brain the same way we build calluses on our hands — in order to avoid getting hurt with every little pain,

The downside of becoming insensitive to PAIN is that you inadvertently become insensitive to HAPPINESS along with it.