u/FlanInternational100

With brutal honesty and without any exaggeration, I spent around 20% of my life directly on OCD, obsessions and compulsions. That is roughly 5 years. 5 years doing only direct compulsions 24/7.

And I am not counting the overall constant obsessive thoughts or broader effect of OCD because the percentage would be 100%. I have OCD for around 20 years now.

I am counting time I strictly spent doing NOTHING but compulsions in one day, during life.

During my whole childhood, highschool and later, I would come from school, do 3 hours of intense mental or physical compulsions in my room, doing nothing but physically twitching, doing specific movements or mentally trying to solve my obsessions, then maybe eat, do homework while being exhausted, and then do another 3 hours of obsessive mental rituals or physical compulsions, often extending onto night or into the morning. Also, multiple compulsion periods in day between activities.

Approximately, that makes roughly 20% of my life time and energy spent DIRECTLY on OCD, given that my OCD began at 6.

But of course, the broader effect is enormous and all my life is basically OCD. Chronic fear, insomnia, scrupulosity, missed opportunities, destruction of development, normal family relationships, exhaustion, etc, etc.

Honestly, this is horrifying.

Imagine what could I do if I just didn't have this excrutiatingly painful and awful condition. If I could just sleep and rest normally, think normally, focus energy onto things I really want...

I spent most of my life severely isolated and living in my own mind.

The crucial years of "advanced" social development (~12 - 25) were spent completely alone, withdrawn. During school I would have that contact with others but after school, I would go home and spend time isolated. I live in a village in rural Europe where there are barely any people other than my family that I see daily.

Since I was really young, I just sinked more and more deep into my own mind, intense thinking sesions, thinking about abstract hypothetical existential question. I would almost forget that I was alive and had to participate in daily life as a human.

After finishing my highschool, I moved to bigger city for college and started being even more severely isolated to the point of spending 5 years in complete withdrawn from any social activities, never talked to anyone other than my family, never went anywhere.

At this point, when I see other people I am just so alienated from them and "normal" world that I sort of don't understand how are they functioning. I deel like a different species. I feel like I never had body, legs, arms...

I don't know how my body looks. I don't know the colour of my eyes, the shape of my body. It's like I cannot percieve it.

I have no idea how or when did I go through puberty. I don't remember anything. I never connected to anyone or even myself. I am as much as stranger to myself as I am to others, basically. And not because I don't know my thoughts. No. It's this constant internal feeling of "bizzareness". Questioning of everything and being weirded out with my own consciousness.

I feel bizzare when someone tries to talk to me because I don't realize I'm alive being. I sort of look in emptyness and observe them while they are talking, umaware that they are actually talking to this being of "me".

I am in a state of severe non-stop DPDR for 8 years. I never "woke up" from that moment when i entered into this bizzare state.

After 8 years being completely lost in time and space, in my (sub)consciousness, in memory...I cannot imagine "waking up" from this ever.

Because the mere weirdness of reality, the bizzare realizations, the memory gap, the awareness of this - can never disappear. I cannot imagine how it would be possible.

The return into my initial state of consciousness would need to be something like dying and rebirth with amnesia where I actually have no this hyperawareness that I developed during 8 years of DPDR.

This extreme self-awareness actually became me. There is nothing else. I cannot imagine functioning as I did before. It is completely different state of consciousness, of processing reality. Completely different sense of self.

I don't even know how did I live before this. It was a weird unaware state but it felt 100% real - in comparison to this which is hyperaware state but feels completely unreal.

I can't do it anymore. I cannot just "do what I can and be in peace/satisfied".

Maybe I should theoretically but I can't.

For every good decision or progress someone makes, there are 1000 of bad ones that just break every normal human.

I am sick of living like that. I am sick of spending my whole life just observing how literally nothing changes and how my own acts mean literally nothing, change nothing. And I'm not saying we should stop with what we think is right, not at all. I am just sad, simple as that. I'm deeply sad and frustrated.

I don't think running away from society is going to help me either.

I am not sure people are aware of this as much as they need to be.

Life itself as a cold, irrational self-renewing force is the most horrifying concept in universe.

Being based on pure ability of sufficient replication of matter, it uses, tests and eventually kills its host.

People need to be aware of how natural selection works and what are the hidden tragedies of it.

The possibilities for suffering increase with the complexity of organism but that doesn't dismiss every single suffering that exists.

Life creates incredibly big number of mutations, "players of game of life", which are then tested by both environment but also internally. This is inevitable process which simply "is" and cannot be avoided. Pure inevitability filters "that which can replicate" further into the meaningless life game.

But in that process, the "host", now being the conscious observer, is not even important. There are basically near infinite ways in which that conscious observer can be tortured because of this game of inevitable filtering and testing. I'm not sure people understand the vast potential of suffering that can arise from this. This is incredibly important argument for antinatalism in my opinion.

Imagine human being with mutations in its brain that simply cause him excrutiating pain all the time? Or bizzare hell-like hallucinations that feel completely real? Or imagine your brain somehow being wired (of being affected by illness that you genetically aren't able to defend from) to experience absolutely bizzare things like having urge to torture yourself due to some internal "demon" forcing you to do that? Imagine being wired to not experience space or time properly? Imagine having extremely overactive amygdala that you feel extreme despair, fear, terror all your life, but you cannot die because you are also terrified of dying? Possibilites are literally infinite. Combinations, types of "locking" you into a state of pain...there are no limits to what suffering can be.

Natural selection necessarily involves sacrifise of big number of hosts, in more or less painful ways. It also creates the concept of "normality" which then works as filter-in-itself by creating mutations whose phenomenological exerience is well-suited for replication and life and giving them cognitive ability to even further enforce their ways of existing and "exclude" all mutations and hosts that aren't suitable. Society simply creates "normality" and is "locked into" mechanisms of preserving that.

So, natural selection can and is creating those "bubbles" of reality, suitable mutations and phenomenological experiences which are the most pro-life. They simply ARE, inevitably, and they are also naturally selected to have urge to eliminate anything that violates that structure.

The fact that you feel anything at all is a product of natural selection. Your feelings of beauty, love, meaning, purpose, etc. - all were once random mutations that persisted because they connected positive phenomenological experience with life-affirming characteristics. At beggining of rise of consciousness - life had no internal value, it didn't "feel good", valuable. Everything that people value in life is consequence of natural selection of random mutations. The "appeal of life" was created de facto out of nothing. It is because it is. It's like making 100 conscious robots and making one randomly feel positive emotion about living - and then saying life is good and appealing. It is not.

It was made like that due to potential of conscious experience to be positive/negative filtering certain beings who linked life-affirming things with "positive phenomenological experience", generally (or at least good enough to lock them into replicating).

And it continues, with every second. Life filters itself more and more. It creates concepts like belief in free will, it creates optimistic bias, it silences those who are "too ill" to be listened to.

Life itself is the first "cancel culture".

Just how many of conscious observers (hosts) were forced to emerge in life and whitness excrutiatingly painful lives? How many had to deal with horrible psychotic experiences, negative and fearful experiences due to this "inevitability of natural victims"?

And it can happen today. Genes are not untouchable. Mistakes can amd do happen. You or your child can easily be affected by random mutation that will make your stomach burn from acid. Or to lose ability to every feel positive emotion. Or to have misfolding in your brain proteins that will cause you to never sleep again.

Possibilities are near infinite.

Life is irrational malevolent process that selects what will hosts think about it and which ones will replicate those opinions.

Life is the master that punishes even good slaves, not alone the bad ones.

I could never even think about anything else than obsessions, mental compulsions, ruminations...

Obsessing about unreal moral demandings, existential questions...

And then my health also declined due to that severe stress and insomnia.

There was no mental space nor time for human relationships, hobbies, thinking about my interests, how to develop or do something...

All of that was just burried in the background, dead. For decades.

When I look retrospectively, all my life, literally day-in-day, every minute, was just pure OCD. NOTHING else.

Other people had all the mental freedom to be creative, to actually focus their time and effort into something they liked.

The HUGE amount of time is simply lost forever. My whole development in one big ZERO.

After limbic encephalitis-induced prolonged psychosis, I radically changed. My view on everything radically changed.

I can no longer be considered human.

I fell off from every "normal" human concept. All those concepts like love, friends, purpose, socialization, sport, nature...everything means nothing anymore. And I'm not simply talking about anhedonia, I'm talking about loss of deep intellectual meaning, loss of fundamental way every human functions.

I see every human as biological machine, including myself. I see everything through evolutionary lenses, all my "needs" and cognitive, emotional urges, pursuits. All humanity is naturally selected bias for survival and only that. All concepts are emergent from nothing. Random mutations that simply persisted. That doesn't make them "good", "right" or "true".

I lost all interest in everything that "made me happy" once. I see it through completely different lenses.

I feel like I lived 300 years and have 0 interest for life, humanity.

I see all the other people everywhere, simply walking, sitting by the river chatting about what they want, going casually in parks, coffee shops, doing hobbies...

They simply enjoy being alive and doing what their mind wants. And it seems like it wants little, or to be more precise, it wants what feels good for them. Their conscience is so aligned with their wishes and somewhat light. They genuinely think they are good and they do good things. They are relaxed inside themselves. I feel like brain baby feeds them and gives all the scrupulosity to me.

I could never do that, never. My OCD started when I was 6 and I was simply controlled by it.

Constant feeling of doing something deeply wrong, constant questioning of every possible act in my life and contemplating about long term meaning of every single behaviour. Hyperanalyzing all my internal motivations, morality of everything, torturing myself to be absolute saint and do maximal good to the point of death. Everything less than that is simply meaningless to me.

I was simply jealous of others. It seemed like "god" doesn't ask anything from them. It seemed "god" just loves them and lets them enjoy common things.

I was never jealous of specific things like looks, money, talents, etc. No. I was simply jealous of other people's ability to be happy and free. To feel joy for doing what they like.

I just always felt guilt. Nothing but guilt. Even if I volunteer 12hrs per day, I feel guilty. I feel like I am doing something RADICALLY wrong. Like I should completely change my life and stop "fooling around".

Only time I felt like I could maybe help myself with this was when I was younger and unaware of deep problems in world, unsolvable tragedies, significance of morality, etc. But that period is long gone. I sort of don't even know why am I writing this because I should theoretically be 100% willing to be that radical "saint" and just die doing maximal good because I will die anyways,so not doing maximal good would be completely meaningless and irrational.

It is horrifying how lightly and unconcerning most people are about moral question of having a child.

Mostly, the question people ask themselves is: "do I want a child?" rather than "is creating a child morally right thing to do?".

I honestly think 99.99% of people never even thinks about morality of that act, which is absurd and tragic, almost Orwellian. They just have or not have children but even those who don't have them, do that mostly by personal preference rather than moral concern.

It is incredibly overlooked but radically serious question. I would dare to say the most serious of all.