There is no light. There is no hope.

Stanczyk, by Jan Matejko

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Sorry. Sometimes it's impossible not to be sarcastic about the state of things in the world.

Not even a subject as niche and extremely dear to me is safe from the everyday “entrepreneurship” so common in the age of the internet and thinking machines. Far be it from me to say that I wouldn't like to make enough money to support myself writing and speaking about philosophical pessimism, a subject I enjoy and to which I have dedicated my brief academic career so far, but one thing that will never happen is selling myself as a problem solver, as someone who will help you solve your life. It's nice that some people who read my texts and listen to the recordings I make of my texts feel good, especially when they previously thought they were alone in believing that not being is better than being, an intuition that is the soul of philosophical pessimism. This is an ultra-minority view that goes against hundreds of millions of years of natural selection, as well as tens of thousands of years of human cultural selection. It is indeed gratifying when one of my texts or videos shows others that they are not alone in intuiting that it would have been better if the Earth's surface were as crystalline as that of the Moon, as Schopenhauer writes in the Parerga and Paralipomena. This was one of the main reasons why I decided to start talking about pessimism publicly, because I know that many feel alone thinking this way.

But there's a world of difference between what I do and selling a kind of business-like pessimism disguised as life coach talk, an entrepreneurial pessimism that claims your life will get better by making everything worthwhile. Especially when generative artificial intelligence tools are used to create everything from text to videos and everything else.

Understand, I'm not an anti-artificial intelligence fanatic. I think it's a technology that, like all others, can be used both positively and negatively, although the negative effects so far have been absurdly more prevalent, to the point that it's almost impossible to think of anything worthwhile. Regarding my field, which is writing and expressing philosophical thoughts related to pessimism, one way I believe AI can be positive is in assisting with grammatical correction in texts. But even in this case, the author needs to be at least minimally versed in the language or languages ​​they are writing in. Furthermore, perhaps — and here we're reaching the limit of what's acceptable to me — generative AI could also assist in correcting the content of a text. However, in this case, the author needs to be quite well-versed in the subject matter; otherwise, the AI ​​could very well spout a lot of nonsense and invent references that simply don't exist, especially if the “author” is actually a pseudo-author and is relegating the writing work to generative AI, which is blatantly obvious to anyone who has the habit of reading real authors. This idea of ​​AI fabricating false references is not a myth; it happens frequently and has been a nightmare for university and high school teachers.

That being said, I find the mass production of texts, audios, and videos that generative AI has brought to the world to be utter shit. Those who take advantage of this talk about “democratizing,” whether it's the democratizing of art or anything else. Democratizing my ass. The true artist bleeds to put their art into the world, art that is then copied and vomited up by generative AIs. In the case of art, as well scientific and philosophical knowledge, the claim that AI helps to “democratize the world” is spurious, since the person who uses it to fabricate art or a scientific or philosophical text, in the vast majority of cases, isn't even willing to learn whatever the AI ​​is spewing out to them. It's no coincidence that we have this gigantic amount of completely fabricated garbage posted every hour on the internet when we talk about science and philosophy. Look, humans can also write things incorrectly out of ignorance. They can also write something they believe is right, but which others disagree with, as in the case of heterodox or minority positions. In these cases, there can be debates, discussions, exchanges of ideas, or whatever. But in the case of things done by machines, no, because the person who puts it in a video or on a blog barely understands what they're talking about; they can't even really defend the position. This is because they don't even have any passion for that position; their goal is to post and monetize as much as possible.

This brings me to another issue, which is the most important to me: this “defecation” of generic content is soulless. Yes, the vast majority of mass produced things before AI were already soulless, it's true. AI didn't invent grift. But AI allowed the mass production on an industrial scale of this soulless “defecation” that only grifters are capable of providing us. It was like opening the floodgates of a dam that barely held back all the world's sewage. Before, the sewage leaked quite a bit through the cracks in the colossal wall that contained it. Generative AI was like a missile that blew open the floodgates of the shit dam once and for all, flooding the world with the soulless garbage of grifters who want easy money. In a way, I understand those who use these tools to defecate texts and videos en masse. We live in a dog-eat-dog world. We need money if we want to eat. We have bills to pay. Besides paying bills, we want to travel, have a decent car and house. The incentive to do this kind of thing was already there long before generative AI came into the world. As I said, AI didn't invent grift. It just made it easier. We could even say that the true democratization of AI was the democratization of grift.

I understand that I am extremely privileged not to be under the spell of this financial incentive to the point of selling my soul to the text and video factory, that is, not to surrender to the trap of easy mass production brought about by generative AI. But, besides having the luck of privilege, I also have a mentality that is somewhat elitist and snobbish about what I do. Writing my texts, and then reading my texts in the recordings I make for YouTube and Spotify, are things that I consider extremely important on a personal level, things that give me pleasure and that I want to show. In a way, I think I'm a big deal. As much as I doubt myself, as much as I constantly belittle myself, as much as I call myself an imbecile every waking hour, paradoxically I also see myself as someone who knows how to express my own ideas, anxieties, and doubts well through writing, despite the grammatical and conceptual errors I commit. But who doesn't make mistakes when writing, am I right?

Writing was, and still is, hard as balls. Writing is an art that requires constant maintenance and where you always make mistakes. In the case of the recordings I make, it was and still is a hard as balls to do them in Audacity with a microphone that isn't even top-of-the-line. Editing the simple videos I make for YouTube in DaVinci Resolve was and still is hard as hell. It was hard to write my book, Procissão de Dor (Procession of Pain, currently only in Portuguese), and it was hard learning to edit both the Kindle version and the physical version, for which I used Scribus, a free software that basically does the same thing as Adobe InDesign. Besides all that, it's thankless work because I've had zero material reward, despite managing to sell my book here and there, and despite having recently monetized my YouTube channel; but even now, several months after monetizing it, I still haven't managed to accumulate enough money to get paid, just so you can see how bad things are. It took me over four years to become eligible to monetize the channel, only to take almost half a year to get paid less than half the minimum wage, something I hope will happen next month, in June. And by minimum wage, I'm talking about the Brazilian minimum wage.

By the way, speaking of the book, I'm in the process of proofreading both versions, the Kindle and the physical edition. I've been meaning to do this for a while now because there are grammatical errors here and there, which is normal for any human being, especially when they self-publish; in fact, even when a book is published by a publishing house, writing errors occasionally slip through the editing process and reach bookstores. It's normal; except, perhaps, when machines are used to do everything. Then the errors aren't so much about grammar, but about style, since the text becomes awful to read for anyone who has the habit of reading, in addition to being awful in terms of content, as happens when AIs rave about things that don't correspond to reality in scientific, philosophical, historical matters, etc.

This isn't a grift for me. It's not a business. I don't write and record readings of these texts, nor did I write and self-publish a book thinking it would be a good financial decision. Whatever comes from this is fine. I even plan to open up space in the very near future for anyone who wants to contribute financially to my work here on the internet. If one day I make millions talking about how sentient existence is a nightmare where painful friction is the inescapable universal rule, great. If I don't, that's fine too, because my primary intention is to express what I've come to think and feel over these past 40 years. It's something that led me to change the course of my life to dedicate myself to academic study. Not that I abandoned a brilliant career. On the contrary, I had failed on several fronts. The professional one was just one of them. It was actually experiencing setbacks on various fronts of life that finally made me give philosophy a chance. Before, philosophy was a subject I had never been interested in and which I scorned to the point of exhaustion during my high school classes back in the distant 1990s. I'm not young. In intellectual and moral terms, my young adult self wouldn't recognize me and would be disgusted by my almost middle-aged self, and in a way, my almost middle-aged self, the self I am now, in the year 2026, is ashamed and pities the self I tried to be and that I was.

That makes me think how funny it is when people get outraged commenting on my essays about Buddhism, calling me a nihilist, something I am in an existential sense, but not in a moral sense. It's strange, because I used to be a staunch advocate of the will to life, and like all advocates of the will to life, like the vast majority of living beings, I was a great cause of havoc and pain. I was even proud. Now that I'm on the side of those who deny the will to life, on the side of pessimists and antinatalists, I have compassion even for cockroaches and sewer rats, creatures I feel repulsed by, precisely because I see in them the blind yearning for self-affirmation at all costs in an existence doomed to failure and without a reason for being beyond mere manifestation. But at the same time that I have compassion, I envy them, because cockroaches and sewer rats weren't cursed by nature with such an unnecessarily profound self-awareness. It's almost the same envy I feel for brutish people, who don't reflect on anything. I just don't feel as much envy for brutish people because I was one of them and suffered much more than I do today by being pessimistic and arguing that it would have been better never to have been born. Affirming the will to live brings more suffering to oneself and others than denying it.

These things have a meaning for me that goes beyond any material gain I might one day have from writing and speaking about them. The mass production of everything, including something that has such importance in my life and that isn't even widely recognized outside a very specific niche of thought, just sucks. Nothing is safe from the commercial grift with notes of Pentecostal church and prosperity theology, not even my beloved pessimism. But complaining doesn't do much good. The ascetics are right ones. They're wise enough to leave everything behind and to, at most, help others with food and words of comfort. For them, it doesn't matter that even their most intimate beliefs are disgustingly violated by God-botherers, precisely because they have already detached themselves from this shitty world. They can spend years practicing hesychasm in total contemplative isolation in a monastery, or in deep anapanasati meditation in the middle of the forest, stopping briefly only to serve the poor. For them, worldly misfortunes like scams, whether old or modern scams, matter little, because the world itself has always been one big misfortune. I would be lying if I said I didn't envy their determination, as well as their ability to surrender their critical thinking skills and believe stories that violate all the laws of nature.

If there were a church or temple that prepared us for death, true death, and didn't hammer eternalistic fantasies of more life into our heads — which is itself a terror, except for those who don't understand what life truly is — I would become a member of that church. I would be there every holy day, ecstatically praising the gospel of final annihilation. But perhaps I've already become one of its members by embracing philosophy, especially the kind of philosophy I'm always talking about, pessimism, and not religion, nor self-help disguised as philosophy. But I notice that there are limits even to charlatanism. For example, what charlatan or grifter would dare to put their face out there to sell Philipp Mainländer's solution to life? Mainländer's pessimism will certainly never be defended by grifters. They are smart enough to understand that not only would it be illegal to monetize this philosophy, but even to preach it for free, especially in uncivilized places that don't even consider allowing assisted death for terminally ill patients who are wasting away without the slightest hope of improvement. Grifters wouldn't be able to profit and would harm themselves; that's why they wouldn't touch on ideas that favor self-annihilation in such a forceful and active way.

Ultimately, it's my fault if I get frustrated by the vulgar commercialization of something important to me, something that almost no one talks about the way I do, that is, in an apologetic way, not simply in a didactic and supposedly impartial way. I'm foolish to expect it to be different with the philosophy I defend just because it's not so common. Let this be a lesson for me. For all of us, in fact. There is nothing sacred or inviolable in this existence. Whoever says there is, is either foolish or lying. There is no light or hope in this or any other world. All the positive values ​​we build are corroded by the world of becoming, even when they are not directly attacked by other natural forces or by other people. Mere existence dissolves what we are and what we have built. We came from dust and to dust we shall return, but not without first feeling every moment of the corrosion wrought by the winds of existence. And to make matters worse, one of the most frustrating things, when we specifically deal with human beings, is this: while there is no light or hope in existence, there is more than enough “entrepreneurs” and grifters to make the world even more repugnant.

by Fernando Olszewski