Except it’s not a darkness. It’s much worse than that. When my brain plays What’s Even the Point, what actually descends upon me is a blizzard of blinding, frozen white light. Being in the dark doesn’t hurt, but this does, like staring at the sun. That Millay poem refers to “the eye’s bright trouble.” It seems to me that the bright trouble is the light you see the first time you open your eyes after birth, the light that makes you cry your first tears, the light that is your first fear.

What’s even the point? All this trial and travail for what will become nothing, and soon. Sitting in the airport, I’m disgusted by my excesses, my failures, my pathetic attempts to forge some meaning or hope from the materials of this meaningless world. I’ve been tricking myself, thinking there was some reason for all of it, thinking that consciousness was a miracle when it’s really a burden, thinking that to be alive was wondrous when it’s really a terror. The plain fact, my brain tells me when it plays this game, is that the universe doesn’t care if I’m here.

“Night falls fast,” Millay wrote. “Today is in the past.”

The thing about this game is that once my brain starts playing it, I can’t find a way to stop. Any earnest defense I try to mount is destroyed instantaneously by the searing white light, and I feel like the only way to survive life is to cultivate an ironic detachment from it. If I can’t be happy, I at least want to be cool. When my brain is playing What’s Even the Point, hope feels so flimsy and naïve—especially in the face of the endless outrages and horrors of human life. What kind of mouth-breathing jackass looks at the state of human experience and responds with anything other than absolute despair?

I stop believing in the future. There’s a character in Jacqueline Woodson’s novel If You Come Softly who says that he looks into the future and sees only “this big blank space where I should be.” When I think of the future, I start to only see the big blank space, the whyless bright terror. As for the present, it hurts. Everything hurts. The pain ripples beneath my skin, bone-shocking. What’s the point of all this pain and yearning? Why?

Despair isn’t very productive. That’s the problem with it. Like a replicating virus, all despair can make is more of itself. If playing What’s Even the Point made me a more committed advocate for justice or environmental protection, I’d be all for it. But the white light of despair instead renders me inert and apathetic. I struggle to do anything. It’s hard to sleep, but it’s also hard not to.

I don’t want to give in to despair; I don’t want to take refuge in the detached ridicule of emotion. I don’t want to be cool if cool means being cold to or distant from the reality of experience.