For the past while I’ve been unable to escape the feeling that I have an irreconcilable difference with a friend of mine and I’m not really sure what to do about it. I’m not even really sure that I’m able to articulate it, either. It’s more of a vibe issue.

We were roommates for two years and I was a shitty friend for most of it, but my justification is that I had a lot on my plate at the time. But I’m also just a shitty person so, there’s that, too.

So anyway, we were roommates, that’s the main thing here. And I’m a pretty particular guy, I want to have friends that I can respect because they’re capable of abstract thought on demand. And most of my friends are, even if lately most of them have been becoming increasingly averse to the idea of talking about stuff. And this friend of mine that I have a possibly irreconcilable possible difference of opinion with is a guy that I know is among the most capable of abstract thought of anyone that I know. And yet, it feels like we’re incapable of having productive conversations about anything we disagree on, and when we agree it’s just a circle jerk of two kinda smart guys going, ‘oh wow we’re so smart how come everyone else is so DUMB all the time hahaha’

I had dinner with my little brother the other day and we got in to talking about philosophy, because I’m taking an intro to philosophy class and really, really enjoying it. And we were also talking about how amazing it is that almost nobody other than ourselves that we know has any fucking Grit. Sticktoitiveness. Determination. Etc. Like, everyone, even and especially the smart people, have this like self-defeating demon inside of their soul. And somehow we eventually settled that like, most people are like, constitutionally anxious. Like, at the very bottom of their soul they are primarily anxious, and that this shines through in the form of their incapability to cope with anything, and so on and so forth. And I posited and my little brother agreed that, it’s because at the bottom of he and my beliefs, we believe that life is meaningful because of a connection to something larger than ourselves, and everyone we talk to doesn’t have that belief at the bottom of their soul.

They believe at the very bottom, that life is meaningless, and therefore pointless, and so on and so forth. But they also don’t really believe that, because they feel like life is meaningful, and they hold opinions that could only follow from a belief that human life is meaningful, but without that core belief to always fall back on. So they have this contradiction at the very bottom of their being that is totally unresolved, and that this is the root cause of pretty much everyone you meet just walking around in the world being a ball of anxiety about whatever you put in front of their eyes.

And I think that this is my problem with most of my friends, and especially the smart ones; they use these sophist arguments to justify being hollow, self-contradicting shells of people. They don’t have any reason to think the things that they think, they have absolutely no clarity, and they are literally stumbling around through the semantic smoke at the top of the room, not realizing that they have to get on the floor and crawl their way out of the house with some clean air in their lungs and solid ground under their feet.

And I think that that’s my main like, issue with this friend of mine that I have this possibly irreconcilable disagreement with. I think that he believes in nothing, and that I do not possess the intellectual firepower (Or, probably much more importantly, a sufficiently advantaged position) to get him to actually engage with this fundamental problem at the bottom of his soul.

Maybe I’ll try again, though. Maybe right now.