misanthropic • /ˌmɪs(ə)nˈθrɒpɪk/
        “Having or showing a dislike of other people.”


Working as a retailer in a shop for a time, I began to develop a far less romantic view of the individual. What was once the honourable citizen, the friendly neighbour and the out-of-towner soon became this faceless horde of beaten-down and fearful creatures, angered at the world or their wife or whoever was in charge. More often than not this anger was directly placed on me (a common retail worker), as I pretty much acted as a voluntary hostage paid to take an emotional beating with a smile. While working there, lonely 50-year-olds would take up considerable hours ranting about the promise of their country leader and the failures of globalization. One particular man opened the conversation with a discussion on the strange weather and that he should definitely start preparing for winter and then go on about a vitriolic manifesto on the hoax of climate change and Greta Thunberg. I politely nodded my head and bagged out his remaining items.

Now we’re all pretty accustomed to the public rage displayed by human beings, these stories are common thanks to Twitter and subreddits like r/publicfreakout. Men and women, mad at the changing times and, perhaps, the sense that they live in a world slipping from their grasp, launched animalistic assaults on minimum-wage workers. It’s difficult not to feel misanthropic in viewing these encounters. Of course, I always try to focus on the good, not everyone is a rage-fuelled self-entitled toddler living in a middle-aged body. There are plenty of examples of the good in human nature. The selfless sacrifices we often see in headlines, of the man who lost his life in order to save a drowning child or even just listening to Lex speak (hehehehe). But all this does is further confuse me. What are we exactly? Good or bad? Rational or primitive? And is it perhaps more rational to be primitive, to untangle this Gordian knot of conflicting ideologies and values and simply exist as animals?

In both instances of humans at their best and worst, I can’t help but see myself in their place. Whether it’s the bloodthirsty, the priestly, the professional or the impoverished, we all share these common impulses of fear and hunger and necessity. Most importantly, there’s this desperate struggle towards self-justification. Whether or not any of us find an eventual reason to stay, it’s reasonable to conclude that not a single person asked to be here to begin with. Now we just try our best to share crowded spaces, sweating and spitting and squeezing together so we can go about our days and find a little sanctity. It’s as if the proliferation of all of these different systems and ideologies and radical views has revealed the most entrenched commonalities between us. A twitching anxious mass of flesh and symbols shifts across this strange planet, consuming (mostly) and fighting (mostly) and praying in some sort of vague attempt to justify its presence on this Earth.

Despite our self-obsession, we rarely learn anything about ourselves. Except, perhaps, the mere knowledge that we would greatly prefer being someone or something else. But this is where the good comes in, art and culture and the advancement of human complexity emerges in this proclivity towards escapism. This condition that we have to dominate and subjugate our world in order to suit our desires for significance only produces further alienation. None of us can agree on that which justifies our existence, and so some of us flee from the problem altogether. We create art and fall in love to escape from ourselves. All we have is each other and all that’s left to do is to create.