Does Love Exist? A Cynic’s Reflection

Keep in mind that I’m writing this as a cynical, misanthropic pessimist, okay? But I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard people declare with a mix of bitterness and certainty that “love doesn’t exist.” As if it’s some grand revelation. As if anyone who believes otherwise is naive. Again, coming from a cynist, I think this particular claim misses the mark. Love is real and it’s one of the most undeniable forces in human life.

When someone insists love isn’t real, they’re usually speaking out of pain, disappointment, or distrust. Maybe they were betrayed by a partner, so now love seems like nothing more than a manipulation. Maybe they’ve embraced a biological reductionism: “love is just chemicals firing off in the brain so it doesn’t count.” Maybe they’ve taken their own misanthropy so far that they can’t imagine people acting out of genuine care for one another. I sympathize with all of that, but I don’t buy the conclusion.

If we deny love because it can be explained chemically, we’d have to deny everything else too such as joy, grief, awe, even the taste of a favorite meal. Reduction doesn’t mean negation. Love might be tied to hormones and neurons, but so is every other human experience. That doesn’t make it unreal. It makes it embodied.

If we deny love because people fail at it, because they betray or exploit in its name, then we’d have to deny courage, kindness, or justice too. Every virtue gets betrayed. That doesn’t erase the thing itself, it only proves how fragile and valuable it is.

Love shows up in too many undeniable forms to write it off. A parent staying awake with a sick child. Friends carrying each other through decades of hardship. Strangers risking something for people they’ll never see again. Protestors linking arms against police lines for the sake of those they’ll never meet. Even grief is a form of love. What else is mourning but love with nowhere to go?

Cynicism has its uses. It can cut through illusion and sentimentality. But cynicism that denies love altogether becomes just another illusion, one that pretends detachment will protect us from hurt. In reality, it only leaves us emptier.

Love exists. It’s not perfect, not eternal, not invulnerable. But it is as real as anything else that shapes our lives. Pretending it doesn’t exist won’t make us stronger; it only makes us lonelier.

Waiting for the End

I didn’t ask to be born. I didn’t sign up for this whole “life” thing. I just opened my eyes one day and the clock started ticking. Expectations piled on. Rules I never agreed to. A world I didn’t create.

By now, I’m 38. No spouse. No kids. I still live with my mom. That fact alone makes me feel like I’m not a “real adult,” even though I pay attention to the world, think deeply, and try to be a good person. But none of that matters, right? Not in a world where adulthood is measured by mortgages and marriage licenses.

I look around and feel alien. Tired. Like I missed a train everyone else caught, or maybe I was never invited to the station. People around me post pictures of weddings, kids, vacations, “success.” I sit with the weight of just surviving, and sometimes even that feels impossible.

The truth? I’m tired. Bone-deep tired. I’ve had days where I didn’t want to wake up. Days where I felt like checking out would be easier than dragging myself through one more empty cycle of eat-sleep-repeat. I’ve thought, “what’s the point?” more times than I can count.

I didn’t ask for life. But life was handed to me like a debt I didn’t incur, and now I’m supposed to be grateful just for enduring it.

Still… Somewhere in the middle of all that noise, I told someone how I felt. And I wasn’t met with judgment. I wasn’t told to “cheer up” or “get over it.” I was just heard. And sometimes, that’s enough to get through another day. So maybe this blog isn’t a rallying cry or a solution. Maybe it’s just a flare shot into the dark for anyone else who feels this way. You’re not alone. You’re not a failure. And you don’t have to carry this on your own. I don’t know what comes next. I’m still here, and for now, that’s enough.

Love is a Choice

We’re taught to think of love as something that happens to us, like a lightning bolt out of nowhere. Movies and songs frame love as this overwhelming emotion that sweeps you off your feet and takes over your life. But that version of love, while intoxicating, is incomplete.

Love isn’t just a feeling. It’s a choice.

Anyone who’s been in a long-term relationship—romantic, familial, or platonic—knows that emotions are fickle. Some days, you feel deeply connected. Other days, you don’t feel much at all. Life gets in the way. People change. Routines dull the spark. Stress takes a toll.

If love were only an emotion, it wouldn’t survive these cycles. But if love is a choice, then it can endure. Because choice isn’t reactive. It’s active. You decide to keep showing up, to keep caring, to keep investing.

When you choose love, you take ownership. You’re not just along for the ride. You’re steering. That means:

You don’t walk away when it’s hard.

You apologize when you screw up.

You listen when you’d rather be right.

You support when you’re tired.

You stay when it would be easier to leave.

It’s not always romantic. It’s rarely easy. But it’s real.

“Falling in love” is passive. It implies we had no say in the matter. That sounds nice until things fall apart, and then suddenly, we’re powerless again. But love, when it’s a choice, gives us power. Not control over the other person, but control over how we love.

You don’t “fall” into long-term love. You build it. Brick by brick. Day by day. Choice by choice.

Like a craft or a discipline, love improves with practice. You can get better at being patient, at setting boundaries, at giving grace, at showing up. None of those are feelings. They’re skills. Feelings can inspire love. They can deepen it. But they can’t sustain it alone.

Love that’s only emotional burns hot and fast. But love that’s chosen—again and again, on the good days and the bad ones—is firewood. It keeps you warm for a lifetime.

What Radicalized Me

I didn’t pop out of the womb swinging a red flag. I wasn’t raised by union organizers or taught to quote Marx before I could walk. Like a lot of Americans, I coasted on autopilot for a while. I figured the president—whoever they were—probably knew what they were doing. The system seemed fine, or at least functional. Corrupt, maybe, but stable.

Then came Trump.

That was the first crack in the illusion. Suddenly the office of the presidency wasn’t just some boring institution, it was a circus, a cult, a threat. It wasn’t just bad policy. It was kids in cages. Racist dog whistles cranked up to bullhorns. And half the country cheered. That’s when I realized the system wasn’t broken. It was functioning exactly as designed.

That’s when I started reading. Rand again, first. I loved her in high school—thought she was deep. Then I picked up Atlas Shrugged as an adult and felt like I’d been duped. It wasn’t philosophy. It was selfishness with a thesaurus. The heroes were sociopaths. The poor deserved it. The rich were gods. It clicked: capitalism doesn’t just tolerate cruelty. It requires it.

From there, I fell down the rabbit hole. Camus hit me like a freight train. The Myth of Sisyphus gave shape to something I’d felt but couldn’t name. This low, constant hum of absurdity. The rock rolls back down the hill, and we push it again. Not because it’ll change anything, but because we refuse to give up.

That absurdism became fuel. So did my misanthropy. Not in the “I hate everyone” kind of way, but in the “I don’t trust people to do the right thing unless they’re forced to” kind of way. I watched people defend billionaires like they were sports teams, as if Apartheid Clyde was going to show up and hand them a Tesla for their loyalty.

I started arguing online. Then organizing. Then donating. I joined the Democratic Socialists. I started lurking at meetings, listening more than talking. I wanted to shake things up, but not just with signs and chants. I wanted disruption. Chaos. Direct action. Guerilla organizing.

I kept reading. Kept pushing. Anti-natalism hit me hard—David Benatar, Cioran, all of it. The idea that no one consents to be born, and that bringing someone into this world is an inherently selfish act. In a dying planet, under a dying system, having kids felt like feeding bodies into the machine.

All of that coalesced into anarcho-communism. Because socialism wasn’t enough. The state isn’t neutral, it’s a tool of capital. Voting helps, but it’s a bandage on a severed limb. I believe in mutual aid, in decentralized power, in horizontal structures. I believe in burning down what doesn’t serve us and building something new from the ashes. Something where people matter more than profit. Where community matters more than hierarchy.

And yeah, I still own guns. Gifts, mostly. I don’t shoot much. But they’re there—”just in case” feels more relevant by the day.

What radicalized me? The cruelty. The absurdity. The lies we’re told about success, about work, about life itself. And the quiet hope that maybe, just maybe, we can break the cycle. So I meme. I write. I organize. I fight. Because if this is a pyramid scheme called life, I at least want to go down pissing off the billionaires at the top.

You know that you tried to hide it Shouldn’t you have said what you meant? Oh…

I found out a dear friend of mine – one of my best friends since high school – tried to kill himself not too long ago. It was because of his wife. He discovered she was cheating on him. They hadn’t even been married a year (eight months.) Her reasoning? She told him that his depression and anxiety caused her to cheat. He gave me the whole story. I don’t know his wife. I’ve never met her in my life. I didn’t go to the wedding or anything for reasons I won’t get into. Eric (not his real name) has always been honest with me as far as I know. I know Eric has his issues. I have mine as well. I know Eric has always struggled with depression and anxiety just as I have. I’ve got something he has never really had though: a support system. I wish he had one so that he didn’t think he had to end his own life.

I’m thankful that he failed at killing himself, but I also feel like shit because I’m not exactly sure how to help, either. We’ve always both just joked about our mental illness. I remember one of the best jokes I ever heard — this is just his and my fucked up sense of humor — being when I hadn’t seen Eric in a while, me asking him how he’d been doing, and I asked what he’d been up to. He replied, “I go to work every day, come home and make myself some dinner; sometimes I’ll play a video game for a few hours; and occasionally I’ll stare at the noose I have hanging in my closet and say to myself, “Maybe tomorrow.” I laughed to the point where I could barely breathe.

This recent turn of events in Eric’s life got me thinking about honesty as well. People always claim they want honesty in their relationship, but do they really? Does a woman or man who has put on a few pounds really want their significant other to tell them? If someone in a relationship isn’t looking their best one day then do they want their significant other to tell them they look like shit (in a nicer way than that, of course)? If your spouse is cheating, do you really want to know?

I came to the conclusion a long time ago that people extol honesty until you’re honest with them. You can tell them all day long how you were honest with someone and they will tell you how you did the right thing, but as soon as they ask a question about themselves and demand an honest answer and you give it to them then you can consider that particular relationship or friendship finished. A husband or wife doesn’t want to know that their partner is being unfaithful. If they ask and their partner says, “No. I’m not cheating on you,” it’s better for both parties because no one gets hurt. However, if you’re caught then you might as well fess up because you know there’s no getting out of it.

I’ve never agreed with someone in a relationship cheating on their partner and just coming outright and telling their partner when their partner didn’t ask. I don’t agree with cheating, either; I want to make that perfectly clear. If your partner doesn’t ask then keep your mouth shut. If your partner asks then should you lie? I guess it depends on whether or not you’re a good liar.

Dr. Brad Blanton’s “radical honesty” isn’t going to win you any friends. Being honest with friends is going to make you lose them one day. My advice? Just stick to lying in order to save face. Read up on it if you have to in order to learn how to do it better.

Or you can just not be a piece of shit who feels the need to do shitty things to people.