If someone ever told you that life was beautiful, I’m sure you responded proportionately by smacking them right across their cheek. What is life, after all? It is a process where one is born, develops into an adult, grows old, and dies. "What’s so beautiful about this?" your inquisitive mind might rightly ask. Well—nothing. The person who marketed this false propaganda must be found and noted as one of history’s greatest villains. I can only imagine the schadenfreude they must have experienced, sitting in their cold gray lair, having a celebratory drink for accomplishing the feat of successfully fooling billions of people.

Like everyone, I have strived to do the right thing, or at least I’d like to think I have. But therein lies the fundamental issue. Perspective. Human perspective is perhaps the most flawed among all animals, contrary to what others may have you believe. I think we are one of the stupidest species on the planet. When one tries to do the right thing, but ends up doing more harm than good, when one never gets punished for one's wrongdoings, when the best among us die early, and the worst among us live forever, you must think, just like I do, that, no, life is no one’s fucking prize. How is one to live with these ever-morphing rules? How is one to live when there is so much we don’t understand? When misery keeps you company for years and peace seems as elusive and transient as a desert bloom. 

Perhaps I am the villain. Perhaps I caused ruin in another’s life story. How do I live with that when there’s almost always nothing I can do to change the irreversible cataclysmic chain reaction perpetrated by my ignorance? By my self-serving decisions?

The world around us is wondrous, truly. The great expanses of mountain ranges, brought forth by the violent collisions of tectonic plates, the perpetual flows of rivers high and low, the magnificent gradients in the sky when dawn breaks or the sun sets, the thick growths of ancient forests—it’s all so spellbinding. Yet, in comparison, we are simple corrupted creatures with endless biases, with an ever-growing list of mistakes and guilt, never truly doing anything right in the big scheme of things. Leaving aside the arrogant notion that we can affect any change on a galactic scale, we fail—embarrassingly so—on a personal level, time and time again. 

You might argue that I must see the kindness if I’m seeing the cruelty. I must see the happiness if I’m seeing the pain. I must see the good with the bad. I agree; I must. However, the pull my darkness has over me is too consuming. It corrupts any light that dares enter eventually and thoroughly. So, yes, I don’t think life is beautiful. I hate most human beings, including myself. And I trust almost none. Why, yes, I am a cynic.