Transcript of You Weren’t Created… You Were Sentenced to Consciousness | Emil Cioran

Ever thought that maybe your worst suffering isn't life itself, but the fact you know you're alive? It's not physical pain, not failure, not loneliness. It's something deeper. Perception, consciousness. That quiet curse that makes you overthink, over remember, over feel. Consciousness isn't a gift. It's a curse. You weren't created. You were condemned. Condemned to feel, to think, to perceive, to carry the weight of existing in a fragile body inside an indifferent world. You were dropped here with no manual, no clear purpose, no guarantees. And from the moment you began to see that you never had peace again. Nature made a mistake, a big one. It created a being that thinks, that questions, that feels its own suffering. While other animals live in the now, you live in trauma. You live in tomorrow. You live in what could have been. You live in what you lost. You live in what you lack. You're not here because you asked to be. You're here because someone decided for you. And now you pay the price. The price of self-awareness. The price of looking in the mirror and seeing nothing but exhaustion. The price of knowing you'll die and still pretending there's a path to follow. You carry consciousness like a sentence. And the more awake you get, the heavier the burden of faking normality. Because the clearer you see, the less sense you find. And that's where your real prison begins. Consciousness is the worst biological accident this planet ever produced. The rock is rock. The tree is tree. The human is an abyss that knows it's an abyss. You don't just suffer. You understand suffering. You don't just feel pain. You analyze it, compare it, replay it, anticipate it. And that's exactly where things start rotting from the inside. You were given the ability to notice you're trapped in a body that ages, feels, cracks, gets sick, and dies. Worse than that, you were condemned to chase meaning for an unavoidable process. No other living thing has to justify its existence. You do. You need to name the pain, explain the fall, invent a purpose for the walk, even if it ends in the void. Because without meaning, consciousness writhes. It collapses. It implodes. Since childhood, you were trained to believe life is a gift. No one told you the gift came with night terrors, existential crises, emotional abandonment, and the constant need to pretend you're fine. You weren't created by love. You were molded by fear. Fear of not being enough. Fear of rejection. Fear of failing, getting sick, dying, and being forgotten. You wake up every day with consciousness blaring like an alarm that never shuts off. A cruel reminder that time is passing, and you still don't know what you're doing here. You hunt for answers in books, religions, philosophies, and all you find are words trying to bandage the bleeding of existence. Consciousness is a cold light that exposes things you were better off not seeing. It shows you love can be a trade. Faith can be an escape. Family can be a cage. That you, no matter how hard you try, may never discover who you really are. Because the you think you are, is just an adaptive response to a world that strapped masks on you from the crib. You don't think out of desire. You think out of curse. You think to endure, to simulate control. You think because the silence of consciousness becomes unbearable unless you stuff it with some distraction. And that's when it hits you. Lucidity might not be a blessing, but the final punishment. The animal feels pain and heals. The human feels pain and ruminates on it for decades. Analyzes, reles, internalizes. The pain doesn't pass. It seeps in, reinvents itself, becomes part of what you call identity. You become what broke you just with a prettier vocabulary to make it sound like you healed. That's what consciousness does. Turns wounds into philosophies, breakdowns into talking points, collapses into personality. All to keep the illusion that thinking is living when deep down thinking is just a sophisticated way to suffer. You like to believe the mind is a temple, the sacred place where ideas, reflections, and creations are born. Truth is, your mind is a cell. a cell lined with mirrors where you're forced to face what you can't control, can't heal, can't explain. The mind is the only prison no one can unlock for you. There are no iron bars, only bars of memory. No chains on your feet, only chains of guilt, anxiety, and non-stop thought. You don't meditate, you try to escape. And with every attempt, you discover the maze is deeper than it looked. Ever tried to silence your mind? To think of nothing for more than 30 seconds? Notice how the inner quiet gets invaded fast by voices. Voices from the past, the judgment, the fear, the expectations, the frustration. The mind wasn't built to give you peace. It was programmed to keep you on alert, anxious, hyper aware of everything that can go wrong because the mind is a product of trauma, survival instinct, and forced adaptation to a hostile world. You think you're free. You're not. You're conditioned. You react. You don't choose. You think inside patterns you don't even know you're carrying. You're a prisoner of the language you were taught, the beliefs you were handed, the words that defined what counts as right or wrong. Your mind sabotages you with memories you never asked to recall. With regrets you've tried to bury, with questions that have no answer. You replay scenes, repeat lines, reconstruct dialogues that never happened. You argue with yourself. hate, forgive, blame, justify everything inside your own head. That's not normal. That's mental prison. It's when the mind can't tell the now from what was and turns the present into a battlefield where the enemy is you. The mind is obsessive. It craves control. It has to understand, label, protect. But the world isn't controllable. And as its reflection, you live in the collapse between what you try to organize and what keeps slipping through your fingers. The mind writes scripts where you're always at fault, where you should have done it differently, where you're never enough. So you internalize pain as punishment. I suffer because I deserve it. I suffer because I failed at being who they wanted. The more you think, the less you live. Because thinking here is just revisiting pain in a fresh outfit. Spraying perfume on the corpse of your inner peace. You memorize punchy quotes, drop philosophers names, drown in books, and inside you continue imploding. What eats you alive isn't a lack of knowledge. It's too much thought. In the end, the mind isn't a tool of freedom. It's a smart cell with the door wide open that you never dare to cross. Because the exit demands madness, detachment, killing the self that thinks. And you're terrified of not being what you've always been. A prisoner who decorates the walls and calls that home. Time isn't a flow. It's a blade. It doesn't pass. It cuts. It wounds you every second with no rush, no mercy. And the worst part, it warns you with a sadistic gentleness. It shows everything you are is coming undone. Time isn't your ally. It never was. Time is the jailer holding the key to your decomposition. You wake up and it's already yanking another hair, thinning your skin, weighing down your stare. You pretend not to notice. You throw on cologne, a goal, a coffee. Time keeps going. It doesn't negotiate. Time turned you into an anxious slave. Not someone who lives, but someone who runs. You run against it, inside it, because of it. You've got deadlines, dates, targets, obligations. Be somebody before 30, marry before 35, succeed before 40. After that, the market treats you like a used part. Time demands speed and output as it digs. Inch by inch your own grave, and you obey. You were conditioned to see time as a resource, not as poison. As a finish line, not as a sentence. Here's where the torture starts. Contrary to what you were taught, you don't have time. You never did. You have awareness of time. That alone is enough to turn your life into a clocked in martyrdom. A tree just grows. You have to justify why you didn't grow faster. A river just flows. You have to prove your time is being wellused. You don't live. You punch shifts in existence. Even at leisure, time suffocates you. On the beach, on the couch, at rest, you're thinking about what you should be doing, what's late, what you didn't become in time. Time is your biggest peace smasher because it doesn't just pass. It measures you, rates you, sorts you. You've become a walking stopwatch. Counting days to heal, months to achieve, years you lost, birthdays you pretended to celebrate. The more you try to control time, the more it slips through your fingers. Time isn't to be managed. It's to be withstood. You don't administer it. You endure it. That silent endurance eats you alive because deep down you know time isn't going anywhere. You are. And no one will notice the last time you did anything. Time doesn't announce. It just takes. Society says waking up is liberating. That being conscious is a gift. Seeing beyond is a virtue. No one told you lucidity charges a fee. The fee is peace. Lucidity isn't an achievement. It's a diagnosis. The more you understand, the more you suffer. The more you perceive, the more you bleed. People who see too much carry too much weight. People who feel everything. Never rest. Lucidity is a silent, sneaky, irreversible disease. It settles in slowly like a fever no one notices until you realize you can't go back to being blind. The ignorant smiles. The unconscious lives. The oblivious sleeps well. The lucid. The lucid twists up inside. They see the hypocrisy, the lies, the manipulation. They notice the bedtime stories we feed children. That society runs on vanity, fear, and silence. The lucid can't watch the news without nausea. Can't hear motivational slogans without laughing inside. Can't get hyped about wins they already know are just emotional painkillers. The lucid aren't cold. They're exhausted from seeing what no one wants to admit. Ever notice how the most awake people are also the most tired. Heavy shoulders, sunken eyes, long silences. Not a coincidence. It's overload. Lucidity is too much light in unprepared eyes. It hurts, burns, wears you down. You try to pretend you didn't get it. Force yourself back into the game. Distract yourself with the same old promises. Nothing fits anymore. Once you've seen the emptiness behind the noise, the world goes mute and you feel foreign inside your own skin. Lucidity turns everything into a farce. Relationships become power trades. Words sound scripted. Gestures look rehearsed. You start seeing that love is need, faith is fear, success is vanity, and kindness is often guilt with makeup. Worst of all, you see it in yourself. And you can't escape, can't unsee. Lucidity steals your right to be fooled, and in that theft, it rips out the last warm comfort you had. In the end, lucidity gives no answers. It only strips away fake questions. It doesn't free you. It leaves you naked, shows you you're alone in an indifferent universe. No one knows what they're doing here. Everything is improv. Every social structure is theater. Every certainty is a defense. Every optimism is despair dressed as hope. Lucidity has no cure. And those who carry it rarely smile the same again. You don't think, you get thought. You don't control your mind. You're held hostage by it. Most of your thoughts aren't born from you. They're echoes, residues, warped reflections of halfhealed experiences, voices from childhood. Judgments thrown at you before you could even defend yourself. Now all those ghosts yell in your head. No ceasefire, no pause, no mercy. You don't live, you revisit. You don't feel the now. You replay the before. Every day you relive what should have been buried. But the mind won't allow it. It digs, reactivates, repeats as if to remind you you'll never be new. Just a compilation of wounded versions of yourself. You wake up already arguing with yourself, justifying yourself, rehearsing a conversation that never happened, building arguments for fights that only exist in your imagination, planning dialogues you'll never have. Your mind is a ruined courtroom. You're the defendant, the judge, and the executioner. You blame yourself for what wasn't yours. Hate yourself for mistakes you made trying to get it right. Punish yourself for not foreseeing what only hindsight could reveal. The cycle doesn't stop. You think thinking fixes things. That understanding relieves. That analysis is a path to healing. It's a lie. Most thinking doesn't heal, it infects. It doesn't solve, it aggravates. Overthinking is like scratching an open wound. Feels necessary, only spreads the rot. And you keep at it. You were conditioned to believe pain must be rationalized. That you must explain it. Label the trauma, build a theory, find someone to blame. Meanwhile, the blood keeps running. Your lucidity becomes just another way to keep bleeding classier. That's all you want to stop. You can't. You want silence. The mind revolts. It accuses, reminds, forces you to revisit what already destroyed you. And you go back. Thought is addictive. Mental suffering is a high-end drug. It traps you because it gives you identity. While you're thinking, you feel in control. You're not. You're the horse. The mind is the rider. And it drags you to places you swore you'd never return. Even in peace, you're on guard. The mind distrusts calm. It sabotages happiness, questions affection, discredits praise, turns love into a trap, care into debt, peace into threat. It learned to survive. And anything new is scary. Anything good threatens the logic of inner chaos. That's why you self-sabotage. You run when you should stay. react when you should listen, attack when you just wanted to ask for help. The mind carved grooves and won't let you step out of them. In the end, what destroys you isn't the world. It's what the world did to your head. Now you carry a psychic bomb inside your skull. It explodes every day silently while everyone else thinks you're just distracted. No one sees, no one hears, but you know your thoughts are crushing you. Worst of all, you call that normal. You think you know who you are. Personality, opinions, identity. But everything you call me was carved by fear. The ego isn't you. The ego is the shield you forged to survive emotionally in a world that forced you to perform early. It was designed to protect you and became a prison. You're not authentic. You're conditioned, not truthful, adapted. The way you speak, dress, react, love, run, all sculpted by the need to be accepted, validated, loved. What you call me is just a character trained to never be rejected like that first time. The ego presents as identity, but operates as defense. It doesn't want truth. It wants control. It doesn't seek love. It seeks safety. It doesn't want connection. It wants recognition. The ego turns life into a play where you're both star and sensor. You perform, calculate, adjust. You censor what you feel, disguise what you think, distort what you want. You learned that being yourself is expensive. So you sell a curated version, more digestible, more palatable, more acceptable. Every compliment to that version feeds the ego and you fade. The ego is the architect of your emotional prison. It won't let you admit weakness terrified of humiliation. Won't let you love fully afraid of rejection. Forces you to keep your posture even while you're imploding. Needs the image of strength. The ego doesn't want you healed. It wants you to win, to be right, to be the strong one, the admired one, even if it costs your sanity, even if it costs your truth. Cruer still, the ego moves from protecting you from the world to protecting you from yourself. It censors your own quiet, filters your emotions before you feel them, sabotages your chances of being real. Because being real means exposure. For a wounded ego, exposure is intolerable risk. So you live on the surface, never dive, never surrender fully, never truly trust. Where there is fear, there is no truth only facade. You brag about being strong, but your strength is rigidity. You pride yourself on being self-sufficient, but that's isolation. You think you matured, but you only armored up. You didn't grow, you hid better. The ego is a monument built over the rubble of your real self. The more you feed it, the further you drift from you. The ego doesn't want you happy. It wants you victorious. And victory in ego land means dominating, impressing, appearing. Even while inside you're dying slowly. You grew up hearing you were free. You could be whoever you wanted. Choose your path. Make your life. No one told you every option you get is preapproved by the system. Free will is a cruel joke told by those who already know exactly how you'll act. From birth, you were molded, indoctrinated, conditioned, programmed. Your name was chosen. Your language set, your religion imposed, your behavior graded. What you call decisions is the echo of successful conditioning. You don't choose what you want, you want what you were taught to desire. You don't decide who to love. You're drawn to what your trauma finds familiar. You don't pick what's good for you. You chase whatever briefly numbs the inner discomfort you never learn to name. The freedom they sold you is a social script wearing an autonomy mask. Study, work, buy, produce, shut up, smile, obey, question only what's safe. Demand what's preallowed. Innovate inside market limits. You think you're free because you can change outfits, jobs, get a tattoo. That's not freedom. That's customizing your leash. The system learned people who believe they're choosing rebel less. So, it offers a storefront of pre-made path, same endings, same emptiness. You call it freedom. In practice, you're herded into the same old structures. Marriage, career, consumption, debt, distraction. Even your rebellion was forecast. industry built a sandbox where you can feel outside the system inside a system product. Your dissatisfaction has a market niche, a pre-written speech, a course, a coach, a book, a therapy package, a black t-shirt with a punchline. Your awakening became a product. Your revolt became an aesthetic. Your freedom became a premium subscription. You don't notice. You're too busy trying to look free. Real freedom frightens. It requires total tear down, killing the ego, letting go of social rewards, losing status, affection, recognition, walking in the dark, no guarantees, accepting that maybe no one will clap for what you're trying to become. Most people don't want freedom. They want comfort, predictability, applause, belonging. That's not freedom. It's bargaining. You're not free. You're a prisoner who decorates the cell and calls it home. A slave who customizes the chain and calls it style. A survivor who learns to smile with the mouth and bleed with the mind. And you keep repeating the lie that keeps you caged. I am free. You're hunting for purpose. Something to give meaning to what you feel. A north star to justify pain. Organize chaos. Turn suffering into a mission. You want to believe there's a bigger why, a reason everything happened the way it did. That's why purpose became the new modern opium. It intoxicates your mind with the idea there's a plan, that nothing is in vain, that every empty stretch is prepped for something grand. But what if not? What if purpose is just emotional anesthesia? A philosophical seditive to keep you standing while everything inside collapses? The system figured that out and turned purpose into product into narrative, shield, crutch. Every guru sells one. Every self-help video promises to reveal yours. Every religion has a prefabricated purpose ready to accept. The more lost you feel, the more vulnerable you are. And the more vulnerable, the easier you are to sell any answershaped thing. purpose became the existential tranquilizer that keeps you from staring into the abyss with your own eyes. It says don't question. Says it'll make sense one day. Says hold on a bit longer while inside you just wish you could stop pretending. Truth is the idea of purpose was born out of desperation. Out of the need to survive consciousness. out of the urge to justify existence in a universe that screams chance, absurdity, indifference. Purpose is the story the ego tells so it doesn't collapse in the face of meaninglessness. But the story wears thin. What once consoled becomes a charge. Now you can't rest. You must fulfill your mission. You can't you must reach your potential. You can't get lost. You must inspire others. What was cure becomes cage. Start doubting and the system bites back. You'll be labeled unmotivated, ungrateful, depressed, weak. Dropping the hunt for purpose is a quiet rebellion. Admitting that maybe life doesn't need to be justified, that being here might mean nothing and that it's okay. That you can exist without reason, without destiny, without story line. That's terrifying. Freedom is terrifying. Meaninglessness is terrifying. Silence is terrifying. So you keep trying to turn pain into lesson, breakdown into journey, scar into identity. Maybe there's no lesson. Maybe it was just pain, just disorder, just falling. Deep down, you know, you prefer pretending there's a purpose. Without it, everything collapses. Without it, you'd have to look in the mirror and accept you're here conscious suffering for absolutely nothing. And that lucidity for most is still unbearable. There comes a point where words don't fix it. No theory fits. No argument convinces anyone, least of all you. You've listened to all the voices, read all the books, rewatched your traumas, searched for meaning in every corner, every mouth, every name of God. Nothing answered. Nothing ceased. Nothing quieted that soundless scream echoing daily. Then you get it. The answer isn't in words. It's in their absence. In silence. Silence is what's left when lucidity exhausts faith. When pain snaps the script. When the ego is tired of acting. Silence is what remains. When the mind finally bows to what it can't control. It isn't peace, not acceptance, not moving on. It's just exhaustion. The moment even your search goes mute, even your despair kneels, even your revolt loses steam, the soul worn out from trying to understand decides to simply observe. You stop arguing, stop justifying, stop asking, stop trying to be understood. Silence becomes your most honest way to exist. Not because you have nothing left to say, but because you've said too much. No one listened, or worse, they listened and translated it into comfortable emotional language. It's a phase. You'll get through it. Just stay focused. Just have faith. You don't feed on those lines anymore. Silence taught you that sometimes the truest thing you can do is say nothing. Silence becomes shelter and a mirror. No distractions, no speeches, no performance, just you by raw. Without the stories you told yourself, without the certainties you used as crutches, without the characters you wore to be accepted. Silence exposes, reveals, hurts, but it also cleans, disinfects, prepares. Unlike words, silence isn't trying to convince you. It lets you feel. And feeling even without understanding is the last human thing you still have. You start seeing you don't need explanations or a direction or promises. You just need the space between one thought and the next. The pause between one collapse and the next. The gap between one belief and the next. In that interval, you breathe again. Not like you got your life back, but like you learn to stop fighting it. Silence is the only place where lucidity and pain don't brawl. They just coexist. You spent your life trying to find meaning. Looking for reasons, patterns, signs, trying to understand the why of pain, abandonment, the chronic fatigue that follows you even when everything looks fine. You tried to make existence a narrative. Wanted to believe everything has a reason, a lesson, a line that arcs upward to something greater. Now you see, truth doesn't set you free. It breaks you open. And maybe deep down you already know what it is. No one is coming to save you. No one will reward you for suffering in silence. No one will show up with answers, relief, meaning because maybe there isn't any. You're just another conscious body on an indifferent rock. A piece of meat that thinks, feels, suffers, and will vanish, leaving no real trace. You have no mission, no contract with the universe. You're not the protagonist of anything. You're a statistic, biological code running temporarily. All that effort to look strong, good, productive, resilient. In the end, it just keeps the theater spinning. Life doesn't care about you, people, even less. You can love with everything and still be forgotten. Give your best and still be discarded. sacrifice yourself for someone and still be swapped out with no ceremony. Existence doesn't run on justice, it runs on survival. In this emotional war we call the modern world, feeling too much became weakness. Thinking too much became a burden. Loving too much became a risk. Giving became loss. You're tired, not because you lived wrong, but because you saw too early how cold, cruel, and hypocritical the machinery is. Truth isn't pretty, not romantic, not spiritualized. Truth is this, you're alone. You always were. Everything you did to not feel that way was emotional bargaining. Distraction attempts to anesthetize the pain of being conscious in a world where everyone fakes. I'm fine. You don't fake it anymore. You saw it. And once you see, there's no going back. You can deny it, keep busy, try to believe again. But the truth already got in, contaminated everything, tore the costumes. All that's left is living with it burning inside. After truth breaks in, there's no rebuild. You don't reconstruct what lucidity destroyed. You don't rebuild faith after seeing it was mostly death denial. You don't reconstruct the ego after seeing it was a shield against rejection. You don't heal, you go quiet. You don't evolve. You gather shards and learn to live with the cut. No transcendence. No enlightenment. Just a new way of walking. Slower, quieter, more aware that every step treads on the floor of the absurd. Accepting the abyss isn't resignation. It's maturity. It's when you stop asking life to make sense. Stop trying to be special. Stop seeking comfort in words that can't reach you anymore. You accept the abyss exists and that it lives in you. Consciousness is a fall without end. The more you understand, the more you come apart. The further you drift from others, the quieter you get. The world wasn't made for those who feel too much. And you feel what you didn't want to, what you don't get, what no one says out loud. That weight is for the few. You walk differently now. You don't race, don't compete, don't need to prove anything. You know that in the end, everyone falls the same way. Some fall believing they were flying. Others fall conscious. That awareness sets you apart, isolates you, makes you look strange to those still believing in happy narratives. You watch the world like someone who knows they're witnessing the end. But you don't scream. You just breathe. Observe. Keep going. Accepting the abyss doesn't bring instant relief. It brings weight, silence, a kind of bitter, cold, solitary peace. You stop hunting for solid ground and learn to float in the void. You stop waiting for meaning and learn to exist without it. You stop demanding things get better and learn not to react to chaos. That's where pain turns into lucidity, collapse into lucidity, despair into lucidity. You're not better, not more evolved. You're just tired of pretending inside that fatigue. You find a place to finally rest. Not in answers, but in giving up the questions. Not in healing, but in accepting the wound. Not in salvation, but in living with what broke you. Maybe that's the only thing a conscious being can do without going fully insane. Consciousness didn't come to enlighten you. It came to strip you, rip you open, leave you alone. No guarantees, no faith, no armor. It isn't a blessing. It's a blade. The sharper you make it, the more you bleed inside. Most people don't want lucidity. They want comfort. They want to keep sleeping in a crib of fantasies. But you, you woke up and here you are. No purpose, no script, no promises, but alive, raw, deprogrammed, unprotected. You don't have to pretend to be grateful for everything. Don't have to romanticize your scars. Don't have to turn pain into inspirational content. You don't have to. Lucidity authorizes you to say there is no meaning. Consciousness allows you to stop, to be quiet, to observe without inventing stories. Freedom in the end isn't finding the path. It's stopping the hunt. Existing without demanding sense, breathing inside the absurd without drowning. This is the dark freedom of consciousness. A state where everything still hurts, but nothing fools you anymore. Everything still weighs, but you don't sell your soul for relief. Everything is still darkness, but at least now it's your darkness, not theirs. Not the one you were handed. Not the one you inherited, yours. The one you named, faced, carry with silent dignity while the world collapses, trying to pretend it's fine. That's why even conscious, wounded, exhausted, you keep going. Not for faith, not for dreams, not for a mission, but because you've learned the greatest act of resistance for the lucid is staying on your feet in silence, in pain, in presence. Maybe, just maybe, that's the closest thing to a real purpose anyone will ever get. [Music] [Music]