For me, they often talk the talk but rarely walk it, or make a consistent effort to keep it up (like virtue signaling, I guess, though I dislike that term because it's so finger-pointy). I get...disgusted, feel hopeless, want to be my best and am discouraged from it, if not outright not allowed to be my best if I want to hang with them. I can't control anyone but me, and I can't have really valuable, long-lasting and dependable connections, either, because there is just no agreement about what really counts. I get tired of being the backbone, and I either have to disconnect or get brought down to their level to maintain their comfort with their own stuff as well as to stop carrying the entire load, and then I end up losing it because of the resentment that builds from all the denial of my genuine self that can't stand the shit and feels like it's gotten on me and is creeping into me, too, and that's got to come off and get the fuck out.
It seems like I'm the only one who consciously and consistently wants and strives to improve, and to make the effort of maintaining and bolstering what I've gained, while others find their comfort zone and want positive reinforcement for being in crap they can't even tell stinks. They often think the aroma is nice. They don't like it when I don't like it. They'd rather I plug my nose or go, so I plug as long as I can, but I gotta breathe sometime, and then finally it happens that either I go or they go. In 49 years, it hasn't changed. I'm no saint, I'm imperfect, but I don't like shit and want to grow out of and away from it. I want to be aware of it so that I can be free of it. Then I'm better for me and better and safer for others, and they don't want that around. "Nobody likes a goody-goody" is the way to knock the good ones down, projecting their own shame, their own sense of smallness and unworthiness. They don't like the light shown on what's really inside, though they need light to grow. The illusions are really strong, and they love to convince the light is bad. The whole fucking world is covered in these illusions, and they're as seductive and internally corrosive as drugs. And we're human, we can only overpower so much.
I'm not misanthropic, I'm dystopic. The people stuff is just one element of a whole world that's fucked and I can't do anything about it. I can only keep improving, but it's not significantly valued by anyone but me, and I feel like I've reached a high point, and could keep getting higher, but that only means there are more attacks, because a good fence or boundary is more often seen as a provocation for destruction rather than something to respect and even emulate, which is what such things, when they are healthy, are meant to engender. I don't fit in this fucking world, and I don't want to, it only wants to bring everyone down into the toxic, steaming, sludgy pits. It's certainly not going to make any effort to fit me or rise up to any standards of reciprocal non-self-absorption, that's abundantly clear. Hell forbid any heaven for any single being. I'm so burned out and sore at heart and in spirit. I fucking like me, and my surroundings don't. I'm tired of living in so much that disgusts. The world may need who and what I am and strive to be, but it doesn't want it. And yet I know the world has never been any different. I don't know how humanity has gone on for so long growing from utter toxicity, except for maybe how it seems to feed on the good. I'm sick of being fed off of! I'm sick of regenerating only to be fed off of more.
I've grown in spite of all of it, maybe because of it, perhaps like the lotus that grows out of the mud toward the light, but it's lonely. I'm not a saint. I'm human and need connection and reinforcement. I don't buy the spiritual stuff anymore, I don't believe in anything to convince me to keep going because there will be a reward. I don't believe anymore in god or heaven or even liberation from cycles of suffering to a nirvana totally outside of the cycles. That stuff just gets me high, it's illusion, too. I'm tired of growing in shit, and it's not changing any more than the mud around the lotus does. I know the lotus uses the toxicity and processes it for growth, but then what? The lotus still dies. What purpose did it have? If I could figure that out, I'd stay. The analogy doesn't go far enough. Lotuses don't die and go to nirvana, they die and decay and whatever is left is no longer the lotus and gets used by the environment for a new purpose. The lotus's existence has nothing to do with the lotus and never did. It exists without choice, it grows from toxicity, it is lovely to those who think it is, and then it is dead, decayed, broken down into elements and is a lotus no more. For what? Why the fuck is there consciousness?
Whatever sparked life sparked destruction, and life only feeds itself from the death of other life. Life is a violent pool of shit. That's more evident than any god or heaven or nirvana. I don't think Gautama was enlightened, I think he did so much meditating he was on a neurochemical trip.
This is my misanthropy/dystopia/disillusioned disdain/disgust/despair/ hands up in the godless goddamned air. I can't even say fuck it all, because then I become like what fucks me, which fucks me, without permission, every clearly forsaken day. I don't hate being a lotus, I hate that there's no point. Seneca said that what is not truth disgusts, but the more I grow in my own truth of goodness and in awareness, the truth is disgusting me as well.
