It is socially isolating, because how can you relate to people when you know that ultimately, you will face the end, like they themselves, alone? Moreover, there is a fear of contagion: that these ideas are somehow contagious and will yet cause others to suffer from the same doubts if I give them voice to release the psychic pressure from my own mind.

The Buddhist and Taoist ideals have been kind of a driving force for me, especially Taoism, with its duality reflective of the binary nature of reality. I learned a little about the original Buddha on PBS and how he had a very similar line of questioning that lead him from one yogi to another in search of ultimate truth.

But all of this comes down to, how do you resist that despair after such a starkly terrifying and bleak insight? How does one cope with absolute nothingness? How do you overcome that visceral fear so that you can actually go one with your life?

Or maybe I'm looking at this the wrong way because it's part of my OCPD where I've just found something to obsess over that is the ultimate obsession--the obsession that can never be overcome? It seems like as the periphery of my circle of knowledge expands, I realize more and more how little I actually know, and that in itself is rather disturbing.