Candide Through an Absurd and Anti-Natalist Lens

I finished Voltaire’s Candide. I bought it I don’t know how long ago, but I’d get distracted with other books as I often do and just forgot about it until recently. All I can say is “Wow!” It was an excellent satire of philosophy in general. Me, being who I am though, I read it through a lens of pessimism, absurdism, and anti-natalism. It’s surprisingly modern and disturbingly relevant.

Right from the start the main character — Candide — and his world are full of relentless misfortune: he starts out expelled from his home, pushed into a brutal army; he witnesses earthquakes, massacres, and hangings. Everywhere he goes, human cruelty and disaster dominate.

For someone like me that’s attuned to anti-natalist thought, the lesson is clear: life is unpredictably cruel, and no amount of idealism or hope can shield anyone from suffering. The character of Pangloss and his philosophy — “this is the best of all possible worlds” — is not comforting. It’s absurd. Voltaire mocks it precisely to show that optimism can blind us to reality.

Candide meets kings unthroned, slaves chained to oars, prostitutes forced by circumstance, and monks trapped in religious life against their will. From the sites of Libson to El Dorado and Paris to Venice, suffering is universal. It doesn’t discriminate by wealth, status, or virtue.

All of this perfectly aligns with anti-natalism. Why bring new life into a world so unpredictable, so cruel, and so universally painful? Voltaire’s stories of absurdly recurring disasters reinforce the ethical argument that procreation inevitably imposes suffering on others. Human ideas are fragile. Pursuits that seem meaningful such as love, wealth, status, and fame often collapse under the weight of reality. For an absurdist like myself, this is expected. The universe offers no inherent purpose and our “ideals” are more likely than not arbitrary constructs.

The end of the book says “We must cultivate our garden.” This is Voltaire’s practical work. Life is absurd and full of suffering, but we can still create meaning in small, tangible ways: tending to our responsibilities, helping others, or our own little personal projects. For an absurdist anti-natalist this means to me:

Accept the universe’s lack’s lack of inherent meaning. Do what you can to reduce suffering wherever possible. And focus on tangible, ethical, or creative work rather than abstract speculation.

So, what did I take away from the satirical work? I learned through its absurd coincidences, relentless misfortunes, and philosophical debates that it mirrors these truths: life is cruel, unpredictable, and often meaningless.

However, like Candide, we are not powerless. We can act, work, and cultivate our little gardens in such a chaotic world, and in doing so, carve out a fragile, ethical, and perhaps even joyful corner of existence.

The Transactional Tragedy of Terrance Blip

Terrance Blip was a man of modest ambitions: toast with the perfect butter-to-crisp ratio, socks without holes, and a bank account that didn’t judge him every time he opened his finance app. He lived alone in a studio apartment sandwiched between a psychic who only predicted Tuesdays and a taxidermist who specialized in emotionally distressed rodents.

One evening, while trying to return a cursed air fryer he had impulse-bought during a depressive episode, Terrance tripped over a knockoff lava lamp at a garage sale. It shattered with a melodramatic poof and out came a genie wearing aviators, a Hawaiian shirt, and the resigned aura of someone who’d been summoned during Love Island reruns.

“Congratulations,” said the genie, sipping a LaCroix. “You get one wish. Not three. That’s a myth. Union rules.”

Terrance blinked. “One? That’s not very—”

“Choose wisely or stupidly,” the genie interrupted. “I grant both with equal enthusiasm.”

Terrance, who had been recently charged $4.99 to cancel a free trial, didn’t hesitate.

“I wish that every cent I’ve ever spent in my entire life suddenly reappears in my bank account.”

The genie raised a suspicious eyebrow, which somehow hovered three inches off his face. “You sure? No ‘make me happy’ or ‘stop climate change’ or ‘bring back dinosaurs but they’re chill this time’?”

“Nope. I want my money back. Every dollar. From diapers to drinks. Give it all to Future Me.”

The genie snapped his fingers with a bored sigh. “Done. Good luck, champ.”

At first, it was glorious. Terrance’s phone dinged. His bank app went from $3.87 to $1,042,335.72.

He screamed. He danced. He Venmoed a random stranger $12 just because he could. He ordered eight pizzas, six of which he threw out because they “looked judgmental.”

But by day three, things took a turn. Terrance received a letter from the IRS, handwritten in crayon and lightly singed. It simply read: “WHERE DID THIS MONEY COME FROM, TERRY?”

He shrugged it off—what could they do? He had a genie-backed balance.

But then his body started reacting strangely. He gained weight from meals he hadn’t eaten in years. He suffered recurring stomachaches from a Taco Bell binge in 2012. He began waking up with hangovers from drinks he hadn’t consumed since college, including the infamous Flaming Banshee Night.

By week two, he was pelted by karmic echoes of every regrettable purchase he’d ever made. An army of chia pets stormed his living room. The haunted Beanie Baby he bought in ’98 hissed “capitalist pig” in Latin. A 6-foot stack of receipts materialized and cornered him in the shower, demanding he relive each transaction line by line.

Even worse, people from his past began showing up. A barista from 2007 wanted her tip back. A woman he’d ghosted after paying for dinner appeared, holding a menu and muttering, “You owe me appetizers and closure.”

His bank account remained fat, but Terrance was broke in every other sense—emotionally, spiritually, gastrointestinally.

Desperate, he sought out the genie again, only to find him running a kombucha stand in a strip mall.

“You didn’t read the fine print,” the genie said, sipping his own brand called “Soul Rot.” “You got all the money back. But you also got the consequences. Consumption is a ritual. You broke the cycle.”

“Fix it,” Terrance begged. “I’ll wish for anything. Just make it stop.”

“Nope,” said the genie, smiling serenely. “Only one wish per customer. Union rules.”

And with that, the genie vanished in a puff of oat milk vapor.

Terrance now lives under a mountain of refunded guilt, knee-deep in cursed yoga mats and artisanal regret. His bank account remains full, but he spends nothing—terrified that each swipe might unleash another receipt demon or childhood Happy Meal toy with unresolved trauma.

He’s learned a powerful lesson: Sometimes, the cost of getting your money back… is everything you paid to forget.

Barking Mad: The Philosophy of Wilfred

The FX show “Wilfred” is one of my all-time favorite shows. I never saw the original Australian version, but the American one struck a chord with me. I’ve watched and re-watched it several times. It’s philosophical. It’s stoner comedy. It’s dark. It’s all the things I love.

On the surface “Wilfred” is a stoner comedy where Ryan (played by Elijah Wood), is a clinically depressed ex-lawyer who tried to kill himself, but instead found himself talking to his neighbor’s dog, who appears to him as a full-grown man in a dog costume. Hijinks ensue. But beneath the bong smoke and profanity lies something far more profound: a surreal meditation of identity, sanity, and the human condition.

At its core, “Wilfred” is about the search for meaning in a meaningless world. Ryan’s life is sterile, scripted, and empty. He’s alienated from his family, his former profession, and himself. Enter Wilfred: a creature who embodies chaos, instinct, and the id run wild. He shits in Ryan’s neighbor’s boots, humps teddy bears, and goads Ryan into ever-more reckless behavior. But Wilfred is also, somehow, Ryan’s guide — his Virgil through a very shaggy Inferno.

The question that hovers over every episode: Is Wilfred real? Is Ryan insane? Does it matter?

This is classic absurdism. Think Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus: the recognition that life has no inherent meaning doesn’t lead to despair — it leads to freedom. Wilfred doesn’t hand Ryan answers. He hands him paradoxes, jokes, and humiliations. But in doing so, he forces Ryan to confront the absurdity of his own life and to choose whether or not to keep pushing the boulder.

Philosophically, Wilfred could be read as Ryan’s shadow self — Carl Jung’s idea of the hidden, repressed parts of the psyche. Wilfred says the things Ryan won’t say. He acts on the desires Ryan suppresses. He’s at once friend, enemy, conscience, and saboteur. It’s like Fight Club if Tyler Durden wore a dog suit and loved Scooby Snacks.

Freud would have a field day here. Wilfred is all id — sex, aggression, pleasure, impulse. Ryan, meanwhile, is ego — repressed, neurotic, obsessed with doing “the right thing.” Their interactions often mirror Freud’s model of the mind in conflict. And the battleground? Reality itself.

But what makes the show so intriguing is that Wilfred isn’t just destructive. He’s also deeply wise in a perverse way. He teaches Ryan how to feel, how to trust, and ultimately how to live, not by giving him control — but by forcing him to let go of it. Just as Tyler Durden said to the Narrator in Fight Club: “Just let go!”

In a society that values productivity over introspection, “Wilfred” dares to ask: what if your mental breakdown is the most honest moment of your life? What if the voice in your head isn’t something to silence, but something to listen to, especially when it’s telling dick jokes?

Wilfred represents the part of us that refuses to play along with the farce of normality. He sniffs out the hypocrisy in Ryan’s family, the cowardice in his friends, and the rot at the heart of every polite interaction. He is, in many ways, Ryan’s subconscious revolt against a life lived on autopilot.

It’s no accident that Ryan meets Wilfred at his lowest point. He’s suicidal not because he wants to die, but because he doesn’t know how to live. Wilfred doesn’t save Ryan with self-help cliches or pharmaceuticals, he drags him through absurdity until Ryan sees the game for what it is. Not a test to be passed, but a joke to be told well.

In the final season, the show doubles down on ambiguity. Wilfred might be a hallucination. Or a trickster god. Or some ancient being teaching Ryan spiritual lessons in the only way Ryan will accept. Or he might just be a dog and Ryan is insane.

The brilliance of “Wilfred” is that it never tells you the answer. Like any good philosophical riddle, it trusts the question to do the work. It doesn’t resolve — it disturbs. It doesn’t comfort — it challenges.

And maybe that’s what makes it feel true.

In a world screaming for certainty, “Wilfred” howls for ambiguity. It’s a show that understands mental illness not as a glitch to be fixed, but as a symptom of something deeper: a culture that has lost touch with play, instinct, and wonder.

So if you ever find yourself talking to a man in a dog suit, don’t panic. Sit down. Light a joint. Listen. He may not be real. But he might just be right.

Why I Broke Away from Nietzsche

Like a lot of people, I discovered Friedrich Nietzsche in high school. Call it teen angst or whatever you will, but he felt dangerous, electric, liberating. While everyone else was parroting morality or chasing grades, Nietzsche was telling me to reject the herd, smash idols, and carve my own path. It felt like rebellion with a brain.

However, over time I outgrew him. Not because I stopped caring about meaning or individuality, but because I realized what kind of individualism he was selling, and who else was selling it.

Nietzsche championed the “Ubermensch,” the one who rises about the herd to create new values. Ayn Rand gave us John Galt, the genius industrialist who shrugs off society to build his perfect world. It hit me one day that these two weren’t as far apart as I once thought. Both glorify the exceptional individual. Both sneer at the masses. Both turn their back on solidarity.

What started as an inspiration to think freely began to feel like an excuse to disengage. Nietzsche was attacking morality from above. Rand was doing it from the boardroom. Either way, it ended with contempt for the people I now wanted to fight alongside.

I’m sure my readers know by now, but what really broke the spell was Camus. The Myth of Sisyphus didn’t offer me transcendence (or male and femalescendence for all you transphobes out there.) It didn’t demand I become a god. It simply asked me to imagine Sisyphus happy. That small act of rebellion — accepting the absurd and refusing to despair — hit harder than a thousand pages of will to power.

I realized I didn’t want to overcome the herd. I wanted to organize it. I didn’t want to create values in a vacuum. I wanted to challenge the systems that crush people every day. Nietzsche gave me the tools to reject inherited meaning, but he had nothing to offer once the dust settled.

Nietzsche lives in the realm of aesthetics: life as art, suffering as transformation, truth as personal creation. But when you’re watching the wealthy elite hoard resources, cops brutalize communities, and working people drown in debt, aesthetics isn’t enough. You need ethics. You need justice. You need solidarity.

Nietzsche taught me to question everything, and in turn, I had to question him too.

I didn’t reject Nietzsche because he was wrong about everything (did that with Rand.) I rejected him because he wasn’t enough. He lit the fire. Camus gave it direction. Socialism gave it purpose.

If Nietzsche taught me to become who I am, then breaking with him was part of that becoming. And maybe that’s the most Nietzschean move of all.

From Absurdist to Nihilist (Tentatively): Watching the World Undermine Meaning

I never expected to inch toward nihilism. For years, absurdism kept me afloat. Camus’ defiance in the face of meaninglessness, the idea that you can laugh at the chaos even when it’s crushing you. That you can push the boulder up the hill again and again and still find joy — or at least rebellion — in the act.

But lately, I’ve been staring at that hill and wondering if it’s even worth approaching anymore.

The world feels like it’s daring us to stop believing. The U.S. is caught in a feedback loop of delusion and decay. Billionaires play empire while the rest of us drown in rent, debt, heatwaves, and endless headlines. Climate collapse isn’t creeping anymore; it’s sprinting. The political system’s not broken, it’s working exactly as designed to protect capital and crush dissent. The cruelty isn’t a glitch; it’s a feature.

I used to think absurdism gave me a way through it; that laughing at the system, mocking it, refusing to surrender meaning to it, was a form of resistance. And maybe it still is. But there’s a point where the laugh feels hollow. Where the defiance feels like theater, and the audience left the building years ago.

I’m not fully gone. Not yet. There’s still a part of me that wants to spit in the face of despair and dare it to flinch. That wants to imagine Sisyphus happy, even if only out of spite.

But I’d be lying if I said nihilism isn’t whispering louder lately. Not the cartoon nihilism that gets misrepresented — not the “nothing matters so do whatever” kind — but the cold, empty realization that maybe there really is no justice coming. No redemption arc. No meaning to extract or invent. Just survival, until we can’t anymore.

I don’t know if this shift is a phase, a spiral, or a new state of being. But I know I’m not alone in feeling it. The world is making nihilists faster than it makes meaning.

And maybe admitting that — even tentatively — is the first honest thing I’ve done in a while.

Right to Exist

In the year 2047, capitalism had finally achieved its ultimate form. Landlords no longer rented apartments, houses, or even beds. Those were luxuries. Now they owned the very act of existing.

It started innocently enough: a small tax on “public space usage” in overcrowded cities, then someone had the bright idea to monetize the most valuable real estate of all: being alive.

Basic Existence Plans

The government, now fully privatized under the United Corporations of America, partnered with major landlords to introduce Existence Permits. Every citizen was required to pay a Base Rent just to continue occupying space. There are different pricing models.

Basic Model: $999/month – The right to breathe, stand, and move in designated living zones.

Premium Model: $2499/ month – Sitting rights, access to indoor spaces, and limited privacy.

Elite Model: $9999/month – Full movement, private rooms, and the ability to own furniture.

Those who couldn’t even afford the Basic Model had two choices: join the Debt Labor Program (indetured servitude with a 200-year contract) or be sent to the Non-Existence Zone, which was a fenced-off wasteland where the unpaying masses wandered, waiting to starve.

Marcus Caldwell, a former software engineer, had recently been downgraded from “Basic” to “Pre-Expired” Status after missing two payments. A red timer hovered over his citizen ID, counting down the 48 hours until his legal existence would be revoked.

He tried everything: selling his furniture, begged on the Pay-to-Speak app, applied for a breathing subsidy. With ten minutes left, he made a final desperate call to his landlord, Mr. Hendrix, a man who owned over 50 million existence units across the country.

“Please,” Marcus begged. “I just need another week.”

Hendrix sighed. “Look, Mark, I like you, but if I let you slide, what message does that send to my other tenants? Existence isn’t free, my friend.”

“But I’ve lived here for years!”

“Exactly! And every year, your right to live gets more valuable. That’s how markets work.”

The timer hit zero. Marcus felt a strange sensation in his chest. His Existence Lease had been terminated. His biometric ID deactivated. The streetlights dimmed around him. Doors locked automatically. Card refused to recognize him. Even his digital wallet self-destructed, ensuring he could not longer participate in the economy.

Two armored Existence Enforcement Officers appeared, scanning his ID.

“Sir, you are currently occupying space without a valid permit. Please proceed to the Non-Existence Zone immediately.”

Marcus ran, but had nowhere to go. Everywhere had a fee. Sidewalks charged by the step. Air had a metered oxygen tax. His phone flashed its final message before shutting off permanently.

“Your free trial has expired.”

As Marcus disappeared into the wasteland, the landlords met in their executive towers to discuss the next innovation” charging people for memories. After all, why should anyone be allowed to keep experiences they haven’t fully paid for?

The future was bright … for those who could afford it.