Voight-Kampff

When distraught teenagers decide, "Nobody understands me!" I can sympathize, because I know what's really going on: Nobody understands them. Or more accurately, a lot of people do, but they're scattered and isolated themselves, and they're up against the superior numbers of relatively well-adjusted masses of bodies competing for food and mates. If a fish in a school pulled up for a second and said, wait, what are we doing this for? not only would she not get any food but she'd probably suffocate from not swimming forward (since she's a fish), and would in any case be written off as a misfit and a troublemaker by the rest of the school.

People who ask questions don't choose to be the way they are any more than those in the school plowing forward with their heads down choose to be hungry. Sometimes we find ourselves where we are, who we are, and just have to deal with it the only way we know how. You can keep asking questions and go mad. You can pretend you're like the others and be miserable your whole life, and then go mad. You can refuse to breathe or you can shoot a bazooka-load of chemicals legal and illegal at your mind hoping it will shut up and obey. Or you can try to convince yourself you need to stop thinking and make it into something spiritual.

I wish the world at large was better at seeing our predicament and had more compassion, but in general it doesn't and so you just have to find those people who do understand and make the best of things. And then go mad.