Beautiful World, Where Are You

by Sally Rooney

That’s the thing about work, if it was any good you’d do it for free.

My sister’s getting married in June, she would tell them. That’s exciting, they would reply. You must be so happy for her. Yeah, it’s funny, Eileen would say. I’m not.

Of course I know in my brain that everything we tell ourselves about human civilisation is a lie. But imagine having to find out in real life.

I’m probably thinking about all this now because I saw Aidan randomly on the street the other day and immediately had a heart attack and died. Every subsequent hour since I saw him has been worse than the last. Or is it just that the pain I feel right now is so intense that it transcends my ability to reconstruct the pain I felt at the time?

And Alice, I do feel like a failure, and in a way my life really is nothing, and very few people care what happens in it. It’s so hard to see the point sometimes, when the things in life I think are meaningful turn out to mean nothing, and the people who are supposed to love me don’t.

Maybe certain kinds of pain, at certain formative stages in life, just impress themselves into a person’s sense of self permanently.

But looking at the internet, I don’t see many ideas worth dying for. The only idea on there seems to be that we should watch the immense human misery unfolding before us and just wait for the most immiserated, most oppressed people to turn around and tell us how to stop it.

still the only thing we want to talk about. Maybe we’re just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing.