Sometimes, late at night, the booze starts to wear off and the world stops spinning just enough for clarity to creep in.

I sit up in bed, my head pounding, and it hits me: Why the hell am I me?

I mean, really. Why am I conscious in this particular body, with these stupid thoughts and this goddamn life that keeps going on and on?

Why isn’t it someone else? Why wasn’t I born as someone who had it together, someone who actually knew what the hell was going on?

But here I am, stuck in this skin, in this story, trying to figure out if I’m the hero or the sucker.

It’s like I’m living in some twisted version of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, where the more I think about it, the more I realize I don’t even know if I’m real.

Maybe I’m just a ghost in someone else’s story. Maybe this whole thing—the house, the job, the people—none of it is mine.

Maybe I’m just passing through, living out some existential nightmare where I don’t even get to write the script.

I’m just a phantom walking through someone else’s pages, trying to make sense of something that’s already been written.

The Vertiginous Question

I’ve spent years wrestling with this shit, years trying to find answers in books, trying to drink away the confusion, trying to make sense of the question that haunts me: Why am I me?

It’s what Benj Hellie, a philosopher I don’t know but I’d probably buy a drink, calls the “vertiginous question.”

Hellie’s right. It’s dizzying.

The more you think about it, the more you lose your footing, because once you start asking “Why am I me?” you realize the whole thing—the whole damn thing—is just one big question with no answer.

There’s no answer. There can’t be an answer.

I remember one night, after a particularly good argument with a friend, I wandered into a bar.

It was one of those dive joints that smell like regret and stale beer.

I found a corner, ordered a whiskey, and started writing in my notebook.

“Why is it me and not someone else? What’s the difference? Who the hell decides this crap anyway?”

And I stared at those words until they looked like scribbles.

Because that’s what life feels like—screwed-up scribbles.

We think we know, but we don’t. We just keep moving, telling ourselves that one day it’ll all make sense, but it never does.

And here we are, just asking the same damn question over and over again.

Enter the Absurd

Look, Nietzsche warned us about the abyss, right?

He talked about the Übermensch, the Superman who transcends the mundane and embraces the chaos.

Nietzsche was onto something, but he was also a guy who thought we could overcome this nihilistic bullshit.

And that’s where it gets tricky. Nietzsche said, “He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster,” and sometimes I think, well, maybe fighting against the absurd is like trying to drink yourself sober—pointless, and you’re just getting drunker.

I mean, we’re all just trying to make meaning out of nonsense, right?

We don’t know why we’re here, so we come up with grand philosophies, religions, and wars, trying to answer the question.

It’s like Camus and his Myth of Sisyphus. We’re all Sisyphus, rolling that rock up the hill, and we have no idea why.

The absurdity is inescapable, and the more we push, the more it feels like we’re just spinning in circles, getting nowhere.

But somehow, Camus says, “We must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

That’s the kicker. We have to accept the absurd, embrace the struggle, and find our meaning in the very act of trying.

But tell that to someone who’s been drunk for three days straight and is staring at the bottom of an empty bottle.

The Ghost of Meaning

Let’s face it—sometimes it all feels like a goddamn joke. We want meaning, we want purpose, but when we stare long enough at the void, all we see is an empty space.

There’s nothing out there. Just darkness. That’s what Sartre would tell you. Sartre’s all about being—existence precedes essence.

We’re not born with meaning; we have to create it.

But how do you create meaning when the world is telling you it’s all just random?

You can’t help but laugh. That’s what I do. I laugh because if I didn’t, I’d probably just curl up in a ball and cry.

But even in the laughter, there’s this sinking feeling, this deep recognition that none of this makes sense.

And that’s what got to me—what always gets to me—this idea that we’re just wandering around in the dark, hoping we’re not alone, hoping there’s someone out there who understands.

But it’s like those nights when I’m in bed, tossing and turning, thinking, “Is this life? Or is this some sick dream that I’ll wake up from?”

The Moment of Realization

I’ll tell you a story. It was a few years ago—maybe 2018. I was sitting at my desk in a dreary little apartment, the kind that smells like old pizza and desperation.

I was writing ads, as I often did, but my head was in a completely different place.

I was, trying to make sense of it, and the next thing I know, I’m staring at my reflection in the computer screen, and I’m thinking again: What if I’m just a ghost in someone else’s story?

What if all this—everything—was written by someone else, and I’m just playing a part in it, desperately trying to make meaning out of something that doesn’t exist?

It hit me like a ton of bricks. And in that moment, I had this weird clarity.

I wasn’t in control. I was just a part of the narrative. A ghost. But at the same time, I had to acknowledge that I could still write my lines, for better or worse.

Enjoy this table, now, nerds…

Table 1: The Absurdity of Existence

Philosopher	View on Life	Famous Quote
Friedrich Nietzsche	Life is meaningless, but we can create our own meaning.	“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”
Albert Camus	Life is absurd, but we must embrace the struggle.	“The struggle itself… is enough to fill a man’s heart.”
Jean-Paul Sartre	We must create our own meaning in an indifferent universe.	“Existence precedes essence.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky	The absurdity of suffering and faith in the face of God’s silence.	“Man is what he believes.”
Martin Heidegger	We are thrown into the world with no meaning but the choice to be.	“The human being is not the lord of beings, but the shepherd of being.”

Kafka Was a Sad Genius Who Got It

Kafka wasn’t some tortured soul hunched over a typewriter for nothing.

The guy got it—life’s a mess, and you’re stuck in it whether you like it or not.

He knew the script wasn’t for you.

It’s for someone else, and you’re just the poor bastard trying to figure out what the hell’s going on.

The Metamorphosis? That’s not a story about a guy waking up as a bug—it’s about all of us waking up in bodies that don’t fit, in jobs that suck, in lives that feel like they’re someone else’s leftover nightmare.

Gregor Samsa gets transformed into a roach, sure, but don’t we all?

Aren’t we all just crawling around, trying to scrape by, pretending this is normal?

Kafka, man, he wasn’t just writing about bugs; he was writing about us.

Stuck in the grind, wearing faces that don’t match the minds inside them, doing things we’d never choose if we knew we had a say.

But there’s no say, is there? Just a cage and a bird that’s long gone, like the one Kafka talked about.

And we’re stuck in it.

“I am a cage, in search of a bird.” That’s the game.

In The Trial, poor Joseph K. gets swept up in some faceless system, accused of a crime no one ever tells him about. The absurdity of it—getting destroyed for no reason at all, and the longer you try to understand it, the deeper the hole gets.

Kafka showed us that.

We’re all trapped in this bureaucratic hell, just trying to live our lives without knowing the rules.

He saw the absurdity—life’s not a story with a neat ending; it’s a mess of contradictions, and you’re the fool trying to make sense of it.

And even if you try to fight, to rebel, like some Nietzschean hero, you’re just digging your own grave.

We think we have control, but we don’t. It’s like Kafka’s endless maze—like being Gregor, stuck in that godforsaken bed, a giant bug that no one cares about, and your family just watches you die.

That’s the world Kafka saw. No one’s coming to save you. Not from the bugs, not from the system, and not from the unbearable weight of your own mind.

Life’s a joke, and Kafka was the one who wrote the punchline—“I am a cage in search of a bird.” Except the bird flew off, and we’re still here, beating our heads against the bars, trying to get out.

And the worst part? You start thinking you’re the crazy one, like maybe you don’t even belong in this mess.

But you do. We all do.

We’re all just walking through the motions, playing our part in a story we didn’t write, with a script that was already set before we even knew how to read.

Why Are You Still Reading?

So here we are, staring into the nothingness of nothing.

It stares back at us, and the only semi-real choice we have is to look away or keep on going.

Maybe we’re all just ghosts in some cosmic story, lost and trying to figure out where we belong. Left or right? Up or down?

Maybe life is just one big cosmic joke.

Maybe it doesn’t matter.

Maybe the illusion of choice is just enough to keep those old hearts ticking…

And that’s the thing, isn’t it?

We have a choice to have a choice or so it seems.

Maybe the secret is the absence of such.