For some people, certain aspects of sanity can be an intellectual curse. The trivial reflections they unconsciously baked all their lives begin melting away when they reflect deeply on reality. They feel divorced from the paradoxical bliss of normie ignorance.

They discover that the bondage of sanity makes one sleep less soundly at night and during the day exposes the world more painfully in all its intellectual toxicity. They probably think to themselves: “I never knew there were worse things than going mad.”

They see the world as a real horror show. They wonder, “How, on mature reflection, did the bad times of the past now seem so good when I mentally ‘woke up’.” They call it ‘Falling Down the Rabbit Hole, “Taking the Red Pill”, or “Stepping out of Plato’s Cave”.

This has happened en masse during the profound paradigm shift in Western culture in 2020. Since then, trust in the mainstream media and politicians have never been so low. But it goes beyond the media and politics. It occurs when everyday life does not look the same as it used to be. In some cases, existence seems terrifying.

In his most famous novel, Nausea, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) wrote about the existential despair of the terror of existence. This book is about a writer who finds himself in the belly of the absurd (as mentioned above, the sane person often sees the world as an absurd place).

Published in 1938, it tells the story of Antoine Roquentin, who returns to France, after many years travelling, to do some research and write a diary.

However, a change has occurred in Roquentin’s thoughts, and his perception of the world becomes freakish. He feels this change like a strange illness that seems to be progressing; a kind of heightened intellectual vertigo leading to a feeling of nausea. Here Roquentin reflects on his thoughts:

A little while ago, just as I was coming into my room, I stopped short because I felt in my hand a cold object which held my attention through a sort of personality. I opened my hand, looked: I was simply holding the doorknob. This morning in the library, when the Self Taught Man came to say good morning to me, it took me ten seconds to recognise him. I saw an unknown face, barely a face. Then there was his hand like a fat worm in my hand. I dropped it almost immediately and the arm fell back flabbily. There are a great number of suspicious noises in the streets, too.

Here we have a deeply confused man with a disordered soul in a world he likely believes is void of God and the moral order. A man who now perceives things similar to how an alien from a different galaxy might see them on arrival to earth.

He metaphorically swallowed the Matrix ‘red pill’ and fallen head-first out of Plato’s cave. Everything has become magnified and uncanny, tinged with a feeling of nausea.

Few of us are acutely aware of opening a door handle, but, for Roquentin, such a mundane act would have all the trappings of a fat worm-like hand squeezing something cold to gain entrance into another space.

If ignorance is bliss, then Nausea caused by taking the ‘red pill’ is Hell. In Roquentin’s case, a kind of melancholy of having done all things without ever doing all things.

More than likely, Nausea was autobiographical. Grumpy-looking Sartre was a hardboiled atheist and, despite being a popular philosopher, his vision of a Godless world was highly perceptive, but ultimately flawed.

In a Godless world, being hyper-aware of reality is a serious strain on the mind. In such a Hell, according to Sartre:

To study the way in which my body appears to the ‘Other’ or the way in which the ‘Other’s’ body appears to me, amounts to the same thing… The structures of my being-for-the-‘Other’ are identical to those of the ‘Other’s’ beingfor-me.

What Sartre means here, is, since he is his body, he arrives at bodily self-consciousness only when he has the concept of his body as it is for others. Unlike the madman in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart”, whose acute disease had sharpened his senses, not destroyed them, Roquentin’s decent into the maelstrom of despair worsens. He enters a public park which leads onto a beach. He thinks to himself:

Never, until these last few days, had I understood the meaning of ‘existence’. I was like the others, like the ones walking along the seashore, all dressed in their spring finery. I said, like them, ‘The ocean is green; that white speck up there is a seagull,’ but I didn’t feel that it existed or that the seagull was an ‘existing seagull’; usually existence hides itself. It is there, around us, in us, it is us, you can’t say two words without mentioning it, but you can never touch it. When I believed I was thinking about it, I must believe I was thinking of nothing, my head was empty, or there was just one word in my head, the word ‘to be’.

For Roquentin, the sea belonged to the class of green slimy objects, its colour a quality of the ocean. Living in the now, things look like collapsed scenery to him. Raw existence had unveiled itself to him.

This happens when our worldly order and everyday objects disappear into the abyss of the grotesque. Torn away from the phenomenological beautiful scenery of reality, the sea becomes an enormous swamp, beneath which, high mountains and dark valleys filled with hideous creatures devour each other every second of every hour of every day. Most of the ‘red pill’, ‘rabbit hole’ folk don’t feel this way, but many philosophically bookish types lean more to thinking reality looks freakish.

If the amoral Godless universe really is just a brute fact, which is scientifically and theistically absurd, then Roquentin’s worldview is unliveable.

The post-2020 visual experience that most thinking people endured after ‘falling down the rabbit hole’ was once a lonely place. But more ‘guests’ are now arriving every day, despite the intellectual discomfort it brings. The reason for this Great Awakening is that double-edged sword, the Internet, and the alternative news on the numerous podcasts.

After all, the Truth hurts, making us feel uncomfortable, as it stings our ego defence mechanisms. But once revealed, it eventually brings relief to the mind, a catharsis worth pulling one’s head out of the sand.