Borrowed Intellect

I can’t read anymore. I try, but nothing sticks. I’ll open a book, read twenty pages, close it again. There’s nothing that draws me in. Just words that I don’t care about.

I used to love reading though. I’ll always believe that fiction is the best way to weave in the uncomfortable realities of life. But I think I’m done with it for now. I don’t need a stand-in for reality. It’s important to develop your own philosophy based on your own life.

Reading now feels like circling. You pass through different voices and different frameworks, but they’re all leading you away from your own. A fatigue sets in when you realize how many pages you’ve read trying to find someone who understands something you haven’t said out loud.

But none of these writers know you. They write from inside their own losses and their own fears. You might relate, but you won’t find your answer there. Their life is not your life. Do not mimic someone else’s philosophy.

I don’t care what Nietzsche thought. He wrote interesting things, but he was a loser. All writers are losers, that’s why they write. Nietzsche wrestled with life the same way everyone does. With ego, with suffering, with loneliness. People quote him like he saw through the fog. I see a man who never stopped trying to convince himself. And the only reason I see it, is because I see that in myself. But his pain isn’t mine, and mine isn’t his.

Whoever I’ve read, I see the same patters. In all my favourite writers. Jung, McKenna, Houellebecq, DFW, Dazai, Cioran. Every one of them trying to make peace with something they never understood.

It's all mental masturbation. That’s all it is. You stimulate thought to feel alive. You walk away with insights and some new term for something you were already feeling, and that feels like clarity to you. But it’s empty. No one else’s words can pull you through your life. No one else’s suffering will teach you how to deal with yours.

The assumption that reading is always noble and somehow makes people intelligent is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard. That just because it’s a physical book and not social media, it’s inherently good for you. Like it earns you a notch on some invisible belt of intellect.

You’re actually better off just doomscrolling TikTok for three hours. At least then you’re not pretending. At least you know you’re wasting time. You scroll, you laugh, you move on. It doesn’t wear the mask of progress or wrap itself in meaning. That kind of emptiness is at least honest.

Books are just as much brainrot, but we don’t admit it because they come with prestige. It feels productive to be lost in someone else’s thoughts. But it’s just another form of entertainment and escapism. A way to dodge your own voice. And the longer you do that, the harder it gets to hear yourself think without someone else narrating for you.

I’m more interested in what cuts through without needing a footnote. I want the thing that holds up in silence. The thing that still feels true after a loss no one understands but you. And you can only find that through your own life experiences.

You get to a point where collecting ideas becomes another form of avoidance. Every new theory is just another way to delay the risk of standing on your own. You’re just gathering more language for the same stuck feeling.

At some point, you just have to trust yourself. You’re never going to get what you need from someone else’s conclusion. You have to arrive there on your own. And when you do, you’ll look back on your life and see you never needed anyone else’s answers. And even if it turns out wrong, at least it came from you.

When you read this, or anything else I write, please remember to never take anything from me. I’m the last person you should listen to. I don’t even think advice is real. No one knows what they’re doing. Some people are just louder about it. This is simply my voice, my lens, my philosophy.

All I know is that you have to pull the floor out from underneath yourself. Let it all fall. Stop holding onto ideas that were never yours. Then see what’s left. That’s where life begins. Your own authentic perspective will emerge from the wreckage of borrowed ideas.

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