I'm 13.8 billion years old and I'm a failure

Over the past year, maybe a little more, videos have popped up in both English and Portuguese with titles like “I'm a 30, 40, or 50-year-old loser, I have no friends, family, children, etc.” Some of these videos also say things like “what to do to avoid ending up like me.” A large portion of these videos convey the idea that the human world, that is, human societies, are like meat grinders, and that losers deserve to suffer and be trampled on. I agree that in many societies, perhaps in most, things work that way, but I disagree that they have to be that way. I think it's nonsense — and stupid too — the idea that if someone didn't succeed, if they didn't “beat their competitors” in the job market or in business, they deserve to suffer and be trampled on, become a beggar or live in a slum. To me, that's a disgusting, grotesque Calvinist mentality disguised as economic science.

But human societies, even the best of them, will always be a small subset within a larger whole that is the universe, and the universe is indeed a meat grinder from which there is no escape once inside it. Unfortunately, the most one can do is try to make existence a little less unpleasant for everyone. There's not much else to do. For example, science has helped a lot, curing diseases and making life much less bad than it once was, at least for those who have access to its fruits. But, despite this, even science will certainly never prevent all the catastrophes that can happen. Existence doesn't work that way. As I said, the only thing one can do is try to make the meat grinder a little more comfortable, as a civilization. But even that we have trouble achieving; and in places where it has been achieved, there are people who would like to tear down what has been built, often believing in that disgusting Calvinism disguised as economic science that I mentioned a moment ago.

Many of these videos, in fact most of them from what I see, are quite personal accounts. In them, people talk about themselves, their life experiences, and how their choices in life turned them into failures. Each of them lists various reasons for diagnosing themselves as losers. This type of video is an interesting phenomenon. I think that everyone who is born is already a loser simply for having been placed in a world where degradation and death are the only certainties. To not be a loser, the person would have to not have come into the world. We are all losers just for existing. To make matters worse, it seems that even those of us who were already born could not have not been born in the first place. It was meant to be, and it was. It's like that cliché that we are the universe observing itself. Photons coming from a supernova that exploded 500 million light-years away needed our observation to say that they existed.

The late physicist John Archibald Wheeler speculated on this, calling it the participatory anthropic principle. The universe generates observers not only of the present and the near, but also of the distant past and the very far away. Despite this, Wheeler was not a determinist. Wheeler's speculation goes something like this: the universe is indeterminate due to the laws of quantum mechanics; therefore, to become determinate, it produces subjects who will observe it at a given moment and measure it, collapsing the wave function. If this were the correct interpretation of reality, it would imply that the subject participates in the formation of the object, therefore participating in the formation of the empirical universe. This is similar to Schopenhauer's epistemology, although he was a determinist, unlike Wheeler. Despite condemning the world, Schopenhauer postulated that events were meant to be. The Will, which for him is the metaphysical foundation of the world, is not confined to space and time. For Schopenhauer, space and time are a priori forms of the sensibility of subjects who observe the universe of representations; they make possible the external and internal experience of the world for a subject. That is why he says that the world is our representation.

But I'm getting off-topic here.

So, going back, we are losers, but not necessarily due to personal failings. Of course, many of us make shitty mistake after shitty mistake without thinking about the consequences and end up deserving to get fucked, but I think most don't. And to make matters worse, what part of our elites expects from us in the 21st century is even more repugnant than what they expected in the past. Before, in a distant, but not so distant past, we were still useful in order to help our parents and the village in agriculture. We owed tribute from what we produced to the lords of the land, and they joined us in defending the fiefdom in times of conflict. More recently, in the 20th century, we served as active members of a modern economy. We contributed and in return received salaries that, at least in theory, allowed us to have housing, food, security, education, etc. Now, in 2026, you have people like Peter Thiel, a tech billionaire whose intellectual guru is the idiot Curtis Yarvin, and they actively preach that the vast majority of humanity is useless and should just die soon, since AI will provide everything for them, according to their fantasies. They see themselves as the feudal lords of technology. Peter Thiel was the guy who financed JD Vance's entire political career, by the way.

This is the fucked up world we have to navigate these days. I hope it doesn't get worse, but my hope and nothing are the same thing. Individually, what can a person do to avoid being a failure by the end of the second decade of the 21st century, at least in the aspects of life we ​​can control? I don't know. I'm not a guru. I just think we should try not to contribute even more to the suffering of others. That's the only thing I think everyone can do. And even then, almost everyone fails to some degree, including me.

Now, on a more autobiographical note, I don't see myself as a loser, except of course in the general sense of being a loser simply because I was born. Of course, if you measure success by the yardstick commonly used in this shit-world, I'm a complete failure, since I abandoned a path in life where I would have been an economist and lived in the United States, but honestly, I couldn't care less. Last year, when I was interviewed at the Federal University of São Paulo for the PhD in philosophy, which I didn't get into, this topic came up. During a more relaxed moment after more serious questions about my project, the professors on the panel commented on my resume and how I abandoned that life to come study Cioran and Schopenhauer in Brazil. That wasn't why I abandoned that life; in fact, I left it because I knew I didn't want it anymore, but I didn't know much else beyond that.

All of this only happened well after I turned 30, that is, more than a decade ago. It would still take many years for me to become interested in philosophy and even more years to decide to return to university and study philosophy academically. Only now, at over 40 years old, have I finally started my doctorate. Most of my colleagues are still under 30, except for a few. But, although that wasn't why I left my career in economics and the United States, one thing I can guarantee: I am happier with my life today, studying Cioran and Schopenhauer in Brazil, than I was before. I say this without a doubt. It's not that everything has become wonderful. That's not it. What happened is that, before, it seemed like I was constantly banging my head against a brick wall, trying to fit the pieces of life together in a way that they would never fit. Nowadays, existence makes more sense. It's no coincidence that one of the passages that most struck me in Cioran's work was the following:

Everything is wonderfully clear if we admit that birth is a disastrous or at least an inopportune event; but if we think otherwise, we must resign ourselves to the unintelligible, or else cheat like everyone else.

He's basically saying that all the absurdity, weirdness, and misfortune of this life only make sense when we accept that birth was a misfortune, an evil. When we don't accept this, we are forced to invent a thousand excuses to justify a reality that is unjustifiable. That's why the awareness of awareness, lucidity, is so central to Cioran's thought; central in a negative way, because it is through it that humanity carries the terrible weight of knowing that it is nothing more than an ephemeral animal full of fantasies that degrades and dies like any other. Our existences are as insignificant and devoid of purpose as those of cockroaches. And this doesn't only apply to us who are nobodies. Even the most illustrious humans who have walked the Earth are condemned to the same fate. Do you really believe that in a million years someone will have the slightest idea who Jesus Christ, the Buddha, or Muhammad were? And in 100 million years? And in 100 billion years? It's not impossible, but it's highly unlikely. In fact, it's unlikely that there will be any living being to remember anything.

Our failure was existing and possessing the knowledge that we exist and that one day we will die, but not before going through a great deal of pain and random tragedies that only make sense when we invent fantasies about divine providence, about history, or any other nonsense. Coming into the world was our greatest loss, the loss of the tranquility of emptiness, of the universal unconsciousness in which the elements and plants rest, and to which other animals, despite being conscious, are closer than we are because they cannot accumulate knowledge in the same way that we do. Their consciousnesses are more immediate, they don't waste time ruminating on the things that torment us and against which we invent positive values ​​all the time, from the moment we get out of bed to the moment we go to sleep, every goddamn day. Being born was our failure. This entire universe, which allows beings to suffer absurdly for nothing, is a gigantic failure. A failure of 13.8 billion years. Compared to that, the rest is nothing.

by Fernando Olszewski