As you move along your life’s path

toward the future you wish to craft,

there strikes a paradox perplexing –

a dilemma you’re both ignoring and detecting.

If the only certainty is suffering and pain,

is existence itself not an experiment in vain?

If all is to die and become space dust in conclusion,

isn’t any meaning in life a mere illusion?

If God is truly dead, gone and left behind

is there not a gaping abyss in civilization’s mind?

But let’s for now forget society as a whole

and explore the soul of the individual alone…

What is it that you have left to believe?

Can a meaning beyond suffering your mind conceive?

Why do anything at all today or tomorrow?

Why contribute to humanity’s eternal sorrow?

This has been tackled by far greater minds than mine,

by Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy in their time.

Oh, how prophetic they turned out to be!

They could  the rise of totalitarianism foresee!

I can hear you asking: “What does this have to do with me?”

Well, everything, as we are soon to see.

For civilization is but a complex reflection

of the individuals of whom it’s a collection.

When the souls of all the people despair

at their fate so brutish, cruel and unfair,

and the soul of the world is dead and gone,

ideology sits tyrannically on the philosophical throne!

The rest, as they wisely say, is history…

The carnage, blood and death is no mystery!

The terrifying destruction of the last hundred years

must forever be one of our greatest fears!

- Inspired by Jordan Peterson