Saṅkhāra-dukkha

I realized I was enduring a video game.

Not enjoying—enduring. Link was scaling some cliff on the plains of Hyrule, one turn of the camera away from a sweeping vista, and my thumb was going through mechanical motions on the joystick, my mind occupied with: how many more shrines after this one. The feeling wasn’t boredom—boredom is at least a stance. It was closer to sitting in a dentist’s waiting room. You know the thing will eventually be over. You’re just waiting for it to be over.

So I pressed the HOME button, quit the game, and stared at the Switch’s main screen for a few seconds.

A few seconds is enough time to do a lot of things. Like confirming you don’t want to tap on a single icon in the list. Like registering a diffuse, low-grade nausea, as if someone gently wrung something inside your stomach and then let go. I closed the console and set it aside. The motion was calm—like a man who has already accepted his sentence straightening his tie.

I bought Sartre’s Being and Nothingness a few months ago. I’ve read forty-seven pages, thirty of which were the same chapter opened and closed again on different afternoons. He said man is thrown into freedom. Fine, but he didn’t say what to do after you’ve been thrown and discover that the open field of freedom has nothing growing in it. (To be fair, he might have addressed that later. I haven’t gotten that far.) The bookmark has stayed in the same spot so long it’s left a crease—like a permanent scar. A very small scar. The kind not worth noticing.

Music doesn’t work anymore either. R&B used to do something for me—those humid, reverb-softened voices once set off a kind of resonance in my chest. Now I put on my headphones, the playlist scrolls on its own, singers take turns crooning about love, loss, late nights, and what I hear is sound waves. To be precise: air vibrating in regular patterns.

At times like these, psychology offers a word: anhedonia. It sounds very professional, very weighty, as though your suffering has been given a Latin name and thereby granted a kind of legitimacy. But I’m clearly not depressed. I can eat and sleep (though sleep quality is mediocre), I show up to work on time, submit my weekly reports on schedule, and when I reply “Got it, thanks” on WeChat I even bother to add a period for the sake of propriety. A person with depression wouldn’t care about the period. Probably.

So what is this, exactly.

I spent some time trying to figure out what I was anxious about. It’s like opening the fridge, certain you’re hungry, only to stand before a full fridge unable to name a single thing you want to eat. It’s not that nothing tastes good. It’s that your hunger itself is broken. It doesn’t point toward the lack of any specific thing—it just is lack. Buddhism calls this saṅkhāra-dukkha: the suffering of formations, the idea that existence itself carries a baseline hum of dissatisfaction. The description is precise—so precise it’s infuriating, because it amounts to telling you: yes, that’s how it is, and no, there’s nothing to be done.

Sometimes I’ve thought about killing myself.

But the thought always shows up in such a half-hearted way. Not the dramatic standing-on-the-rooftop-hair-whipping-in-the-wind kind. More like you’re sitting on the toilet scrolling your phone and the words “maybe just call it quits” drift through, and then a push notification pops up about a food delivery discount, and the thought dissolves. It’s too light. So light you can’t be sure whether it counts as a thought at all, or just a random firing of nerve endings.

More than dying, I lean toward a gentler and far more impossible option: never having come at all. Not disappearing—disappearing implies first existing and then being erased, a process, traces to clean up, the question of what to do about your social media accounts. Rather, there simply never having been such a person to begin with. One fewer variable in the world’s equation, no effect on the computation. Very clean.

But this too is just a thought.

Because while you’re thinking these things, your stomach growls. Or a delivery arrives. Or the toilet tank lets out an enigmatic gurgle. The body and the everyday possess a kind of blunt-force hegemony; they don’t allow you to see nihilism through to its conclusion. You can believe everything is meaningless and still agonize over which restaurant to pick on the delivery app. This is the most undignified part of the human condition: your existential crisis can never beat your stomach.

So I wait. Not for anything specific—not for a person, a job, an opportunity. For a kind of moment. It happens occasionally, without cause: the texture of reality suddenly shifts. Maybe it’s the shape of a cloud at dusk, maybe a certain vocal run in a song that pierces through the membrane, maybe waking at midnight to find moonlight pooled on the floor. You can’t say why, but for that one second you feel that being alive is acceptable.

Just that one second. Then it leaves, and the world reverts to normal.

I don’t know what to call it. Grace—the word is too grand. Satori—too Buddhist. Channeling—too charlatan. Probably just the brain secreting a little something now and then, rewarding you for not giving up. A very physiological affair.

But I am, in fact, holding on for that one second.

Saying this out loud is neither heroic nor poignant—it’s even a little absurd. Like a man walking through a desert, not because he believes there’s an oasis ahead, but because last time he was walking, a drop of dew happened to land on his lips.

That’s all.

He keeps walking. Not brave, not strong. Just still walking.