by Ghulam Mohammad Khan
And here we remain, children of a world built on decay, staring into our screens as if they might protect us from emptiness. We await the next invention, convinced it might bring relief. Yet the void was never an error; it is the foundation.
Time and Suffering
All discourse is shaped by its epistemic regime. What we think is largely determined by where and how we live. Before dismissing the following as the lament of a disaffected mind, consider its origin: a Kashmiri lower-middle-class existence, barely educated, technologically delayed, trapped in nostalgia for a pre-industrial past, and mostly indifferent to civic responsibility. This environment cultivates a particular form of despair, an enduring one. As Pierre Bourdieu might frame it, my habitus is one in which suffering is not an occasional guest but a permanent and unwelcome housemate.
If existence is, as Schopenhauer proposed, a pendulum swinging between pain and boredom, then the cruelty lies in its chronology. The tragedy unfolds in a line: we arrive as unknowing infants, acquire just enough awareness to be tormented by it, and by the time we comprehend its futility, we are finished. A reversal would be more elegant. Begin as an old man, already disillusioned by God, love, and the illusory promises of happiness. Then move backwards, shedding attachments and knowledge, descending into childhood’s indifference before finally disappearing. Beckett would not object. “The end is in the beginning, and yet you go on.” Yet we are condemned to move forward like Sisyphus, although Camus omitted one detail: the boulder is also burning.
Nietzsche might identify this inverted existence as the most radical form of amor fati, a genuine love of fate through its reversal. Imagine a life that begins in grief at one’s funeral, proceeds to unlearn affection and belief in middle age, and ends in the peaceful indifference of infancy. To cease existing after having abandoned all care is to outwit suffering itself. Žižek might argue that the only escape from ideology is to feign innocence of ever having entered it.
Discipline of Ageing
Ageing is not the culmination of wisdom. It is chronology’s slow fall into sanctioned absurdity. Institutions, medical, spiritual, and economic, collaborate in choreographed absurdity to convince us that suffering is not only natural but noble. If Marx observed that religion was the opium of the people, he would today recognise despair as a marketplace. The new narcotics are subscriptions. Yoga apps. Medicated contentment.
Each of these solutions is a ritual, performed with the precision of a liturgy. Bourdieu would describe them as symbolic violence disguised as wellness. Meditation urges, “Breathe through nothingness.” Education promises emancipation, only to lead to a better-compensated confinement. Religion offers deferred relief, with caveats. Commerce, untouched by irony, suggests a freelance engagement with misery.
As Žižek would remark with pleasure, these systems do not ease pain; they entrench it. They repackage suffering as structure, presenting the grotesque as necessary. Meaning becomes procedural. We manufacture it by habit. Like Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon, we await something undefined, convinced that persistence itself is the point. The outcome is an entire society convinced that decay is progress. Age is not resisted; it is archived and billed monthly.
The Illusion of Coherence
We continue moving. What once qualified as anguish is now labelled, treated, and monetised. The unbearable part of living is not the suffering itself but the insistence that it must be meaningful. Kafka once observed, “A cage went in search of a bird.” Today, we call that financial planning.
Existence, absurd yet persistent, operates like a bureaucratic device. It gathers fragments, joy, trauma, Tuesday afternoons, and sorts them under a false order. Hegel might see this as a kind of dialectic, where contradiction leads to synthesis, though even he would question the triviality of the materials. Eventually, these particles harden, forming what Durkheim would identify as the sediment of social life. The result is a rock: solid, coherent, and falsely permanent.
But this solidity is a hallucination shared across cultures. Nietzsche would reject the impulse to compress chaos into layers. Identity becomes mistaken for truth through sheer repetition. We not only carry the burden of this rock; we defend its necessity. We assert, “This is me,” as though the compression of years had forged something true.
The Crack in the Rock
The cosmic joke arrives at the moment of rupture, when the rock fractures and reveals the indifference lying beneath. Lacan might name this the Real, interrupting the polished structure of the Symbolic Order. Beckett might mutter that there is nothing funnier than unhappiness. Faced with this absurd unveiling, we do what is expected of the well-trained existential coward. We turn silent. Not the silence of insight, but the silence of a child caught mid-lie, suddenly confronted with the realisation that the monster under the bed is a pile of unwashed clothes.
We become monuments to our credulity, holding our sedimentary identities with the reverence reserved for sacred texts. Yet we learn, too late, that the only burden heavier than the rock is the sudden lightness when it begins to dissolve. In such a moment, one might imagine Foucault observing, “You believed you were a mountain. In fact, you are a roadside cairn.”
The Original Humiliation
Existence begins in a grotesque biological scramble. Millions of sperm, like anxious commuters in an irrational metro, hurl themselves down narrow tunnels. One reaches the finish and claims the prize of being. From this moment of violence, suffering follows with the precision of a well-rehearsed tragedy. Althusser might describe this as the interpellation of flesh: the subject is flung, formless and howling, into society’s waiting framework, where identity is shaped by relentless pressure.
The narrative is already prepared. One labours like a Marxian proletarian, though the surplus generated is only exhaustion. Health becomes visible only in its failure. The body becomes a device, often broken, rarely serviced. Education presents itself as liberation, but functions more like Bentham’s panopticon. Religious guilt arrives on time, summoned by the failure to attend prayer. Love, as Lacan would argue, chases a fantasy object that dissolves when met. Instead, reality presents leftovers and silence across the dinner table.
Capitalism demands attendance at a shopfront, the worker a silent clown in a Beckett play, waiting for customers who never appear. When success does arrive, it is hollow. Politics performs as a Debordian spectacle, monotonous to the point of physical discomfort, which mirrors the rotting stomach brought on by low wages and unending stress. Desires, imagined as transgressions from a Bataillean fantasy, resolve instead in roadside quarrels and the sound of a mother weeping in the back seat of a car headed to the hospital.
Even the sublime falters. Shakespeare and Derrida form a pile of cultural capital, but they offer no warmth during power outages. The shikara ride on the Dal is ruined by the suspicion in strangers’ eyes. Hospitals mark the closing act, Foucauldian spaces where death hovers but never exits with dignity.
No Exit
The cruellest part is the absence of escape. Death offers no conclusion. It simply shifts one into memory, condemned to haunt one’s past like a spirit caught in reruns. Cioran once remarked that humans are born tired and die in parts. There is comfort only in knowing that the man who overtook you in traffic is equally discontented.
A Nietzschean genealogy of history does not yield a tale of ascent but a recurring sequence of labour. Each civilisation, like a stand-up comic stretching one bad joke into an entire set, attempts to turn suffering into spectacle. Marx identified class conflict as history’s engine, but even he might flinch at the mundanity of the domination. The pyramids were stacked on broken spines. The Renaissance sparkled in the shadow of the plague. The Industrial Revolution only hastened the body’s decline.
What we name “development” is little more than continuous injury, masked by occasional intermissions. The wheel allowed greater burdens. Democracy offers the illusion of agency. The internet loops isolation in an endless scroll. Culture constructs rituals around meaningless toil, as if a colony of ants could draft epics in the middle of a flood.
Perhaps the most unforgiving twist is that we glorify the burden. War becomes heroism. Poverty acquires the language of resilience. Generational labour is described as heritage. As Adorno might observe, even atrocity is streamlined into cultural content. The Holocaust is archived, colonialism reduced to academic footnotes, and anxiety packaged with wellness infographics and expensive drinks.
And here we remain, children of a world built on decay, staring into our screens as if they might protect us from emptiness. We await the next invention, convinced it might bring relief. Yet the void was never an error; it is the foundation. As Beckett’s characters once concluded, nothing happens, no one arrives, no one leaves. And still the performance continues.
The Liturgy of Grief
Every mourning house follows a familiar pattern. Grief becomes a script, performed with the precision of ritual, echoing Durkheim’s collective effervescence. In these spaces, sorrow is reframed into soft certainties, where the dead are imagined reclining in celestial lounges reserved for the morally upright. This is not compassion. It is ideological triage, a fiction deployed to bind the wound that death leaves behind. “He is in a better place,” they insist, with the earnestness of a merchant peddling warranties for goods already beyond repair. The aim is unmistakable: to turn death’s finality into a manageable story, as alchemists once claimed to convert lead into gold, delivering only fool’s gold instead.
This is one layer in the elaborate social fiction called civilisation. When life brings ruin, we reach for Freud’s sublimation, modelling our defeat into lessons. Bankruptcy becomes a gateway to humility. Bourdieu would identify this as misrecognition, transforming structural collapse into private revelation. The unemployed academic calls it a sabbatical. The abandoned partner calls it growth. The farmer who has lost a harvest invokes divine will. All are equally fragile. All are equally necessary. The alternative, as Nietzsche cautioned, is too deep for tears and too grim for words.
What society names as order is often only a prosthetic for meaning. Foucault’s disciplinary structures parade as tradition, morality, and common sense. Their function is palliative. We bear forced marriages, relentless schedules, and the absurdity of fashion not because they hold wisdom, but because their absence reveals something far worse. Like Kafka’s figures at the gates of the Law, we kneel before the silence rather than admit there is nothing behind it. Even defiance becomes theatre. The rebel who spits on convention adopts another uniform. Marcuse had no illusions. Repressive desublimation is still repression.
So we proceed, leaning on our curated beliefs, heaven, karma, the myth of meritocracy, breakfast rituals, for comfort. The unfiltered truth cannot be endured. Beckett’s Hamm phrased it with clarity: you are on Earth, and there is no cure for that.
Age accumulates not only in years but in affiliations, familial, ideological, social, woven around us in a Foucauldian mesh so fine it merges with our anatomy. To question these ties feels as senseless as examining a spleen. This is the Heideggerian condition into which we are thrown: a state endured without comprehension. Children arrive, screaming, and their needs soon feel as necessary as breath. Their presence is never deliberated. It is absorbed. Like Marx’s labourer who synchronises with the machine, we internalise the logic of these attachments until they appear natural.
The Aesthetics of Endurance
The justifications we construct are intricate. The mother names her fatigue love. The worker recasts alienation as duty. The believer praises silence as a divine mystery. These are simulations in Baudrillard’s sense, representations that shield suffering beneath familiar symbols. The tree does not resent its withering leaves, and we do not resist our bonds. Even when these connections decay, when betrayal comes from a spouse or neglect from a friend, we interpret the collapse as instruction. “It taught me resilience,” we declare, as if existence were nothing more than a compulsory seminar in endurance.
Let us call it what it is. Some attachments are concealed forms of violence. The lover who manipulates through displays of fragility, the employer who masks insecurity as freedom, the nation that frames control as loyalty, these are not natural bonds. They are designed to cause systemic harm. Adorno might call this the administered world in practice. We reject them only when the illusion breaks. When parental affection arrives with a list of debts. When divine providence begins to resemble financial fraud. Even then, like Freud’s melancholics, we cling to our shackles, not because they offer comfort, but because the absence of structure feels more terrifying than pain itself.
Contemporary astrophysics offers little solace. These vast calculations, billions of light years, trillions of stars, galaxies more numerous than germs on a classroom door, do not inspire awe. They erase us. They position humanity as a brief smear on a minor rock adrift in silence. We are stardust, yes, but so is waste. The observation flatters no one.
Consider the astronaut who, suspended in the blackness, saw Earth as a fragile blue sphere and wept. One need not read Heidegger to grasp that dread. The tears were not a poetic response. They were the plainest expression of our condition: stranded in a void, holding close the stories we tell ourselves, while space pays no attention. Camus phrased it. The universe is beautiful, and it is not for us.
The Silent Cosmos
The daily agony we dress in drama, the rituals of love, work, and mourning, do not register in the wider order. Freud’s pleasure principle falls flat. The death drive, redundant. On the cosmic scale, we were already erased. Motion continues, but the account has closed.
And what of the experiences we prize? Love, ambition, grief, all these are flickers in a biological mechanism. Neural impulses in a temporary organism. Their meaning is local. Their resonance, negligible. The light from a supernova may travel through space for millennia, but if it meets no eye, it performs no miracle. Sartre called it nausea. This is something deeper. This is vertigo without end.
(Born and raised in Sonawari (Bandipora) on the shores of Wullar Lake, the author is an Assistant Professor at HKM Degree College. Ideas are personal.)
