How can a person prove they exist? Not with an ID card, a pay stub, or likes on social media. This book tries to answer that question, but offers not an answer, rather twenty attempts to get closer.
The author starts with a sleepless night and takes apart the basic structure of existence: self-deception is your first breath, relationships are your chain of evidence, every choice is a performance forced upon you, and every consequence is something you reinterpret as reasonable. Definitions are instruments of torture, other people's gazes are cages, desire is never satisfied, and nothingness is never far away. You think you have a fixed “self,” but really you're just countless moments of “happening.”
This book doesn't preach. It tells the story of a middle-aged man in debt, unable to write, sitting at his kitchen table and typing on a broken keyboard, and how he finds clarity in self-deception, becomes trapped and then freed by relationships, and chokes and breathes within definitions. It doesn't teach you how to live better. It only tells you that the contradictions, pain, hypocrisy, and loneliness you feel aren't your sickness alone. They're normal symptoms of existence.
Accept that you'll never be fully understood, and that you'll never fully understand anyone else. Accept that your sense of meaning is an illusion you've made for yourself. Accept that your love is mixed with narcissism. Then keep living. Keep talking, keep making mistakes, keep forgiving yourself. That's all this book can give you.
