The Desire to Not Exist ► Explained With Dark Souls
Have you ever wanted to just not exist? This feeling of wanting to fall asleep and just never wake up. You don’t want to die. It’s more like you want to magically disappear. If there was no sadness or violence or anything, then you’d be okay with just not existing anymore. I used to scroll YouTube shorts so much to the point where I get dizzy and nauseous. And I knew that I should get up and go do something else, but I
Just couldn’t. Scrolling didn’t help me feel like I wanted to exist more. It just kept me stuck. It made me feel so annoyed and stupid. I don’t know why I kept doing these things that I knew weren’t good for me, but I just kept doing them. I stopped choosing how I spent my time. I was basically living on autopilot. I felt like such a waste of space. But then I played the game Dark Souls and it actually made me
Realize why I didn’t want to exist and also showed me how to start being actually happy to exist. If you’re at all familiar with Dark Souls, you’ll know that the main safe area of the game is called Firelink Shrine. At this point, we’ve already beaten the intro, like the tutorial for the game. And this is where things really get started. Here, we can find this guy. He’s just sitting looking at the bonfire. He doesn’t have a name. We just call him
The Crestfallen warrior. A quick Google search will show that the word crestfallen means sad and disappointed, which already tells you a lot about our new friend here. When you talk to him, he’s immediately cynical. He tells you that the prophecy is wrong, that you’d have been better off rotting in the asylum, that there’s no point in really trying anymore than people already have. And the more you listen to him, the more it feels like he was on the same journey
As us once. Maybe he just didn’t make it very far. He even says he’d rather die than go down into Blight Town, which makes it feel like he’s already been there and decided to never go back. And instead, he returned to Firelink Shrine, empty-handed, crestfallen, and done trying. So, it kind of makes sense why he greetss us the way he does. He’s not speaking out of pure cynicism just because, but because he tried already and thought it was too hard and so just
Gave up and now just sits there looking at the bonfire. But we are not deterred. We ring the bell above and he’s surprised. Oh, somebody rang the bell. Wait, was it you? You never give up, do you? I don’t know how you do it. Well, don’t stop now. Only one more, >> but it’s going to be suicide. >> Of course, he’s still got to give us some more words of encouragement, but it’s here we see like a little crack in
His demeanor. It’s like he didn’t think it was possible. But still, he sits. We continue forward. We make our way down through the dreaded and plaginfested blight town. We defeat more difficult and gross enemies. We beat the scary chaos witch quailag. And then eventually, we managed to ring the second bell of awakening. This is an awesome moment for us. But something interesting happens to our friend back at the shrine. >> Did you ring the second bell? That is
Incredible, I must say. Well, what are you going to do? I’ve already decided. I don’t really care. I’m simply crestfallen. After we talk to him this last time, he leaves the shrine. We can find him below the shrine in the new Londo ruins. Here, he draws his sword on us and attacks us on site. He’s lost his mind. He’s gone hollow. When I found him there on my first playthrough, I was actually kind of sad. Like, I like that guy. But it
Was at that point that I realized the undead keep themselves from going hollow by finding a goal and working towards it, right? As long as they have something to strive for, they won’t go hollow. His goal was apathy, meaning his motive was showing to everyone his lack of interest and lack of concern for anything. He enjoyed putting on a show of always being unenthusiastic. He was keeping himself from going hollow by sitting there and poking fun at
Everyone. Content with the knowledge that he knew no one would ever actually be the chosen undead and he could lead a simple peaceful life sitting at Firelink Shrine and then you come along, ring the bells and take that away from him. We also showed him that everything he was saying was impossible was actually very possible. It was just him that was coping his way through life. That realization that he could have been the hero the whole time is what finally
Breaks him. The desire to not exist comes from living without action, without movement, and without a self that is being tested by reality. The desire to not exist doesn’t happen because life is unbearable. It’s desired because you feel obsolete. He felt like he became obsolete. What reason should he be there if all the heroes are here? Even the freaking chosen undead is here and all he does is sit and make comments. So he removed himself. He had
No greater purpose. So he admitted that he is just simply crestf fallen, just sad and disappointed. And can you blame him? If you spend all this time doing nothing and telling everyone around you that this thing that you want to do, too is impossible, and then you see someone else come and do it right in front of your eyes, wouldn’t you be kind of sad, too? Well, it’s easy to see his shortcomings, but it’s harder to look at
The truth and realize we are all forcing ourselves into the same situation as the crest fallen warrior. We sit inside all day watching videos, watching the world pass us by. We even see our friends or people that we used to know achieve things that we thought that nobody our age would achieve. You see, people grow up and actually build their lives while we sit there watching videos like how we did since we were 15 years old. But an
Important thing to note is that if you attack the Crestfallen warrior before he goes hollow, he defends himself. He fights back. Someone who just wanted to die would probably not fight back, but he does. So, it’s clear that he actually still wants to live because someone who truly wants to die probably wouldn’t do that even after everything. Even after giving up, he still wants to live. And that’s the part that people misunderstand about the desire to not
Exist. You don’t actually want to die. You just don’t want to be here like this anymore. And honestly, if someone attacked you in real life, even on your worst day, even when you feel sluggish, empty, checked out, you’d still protect yourself because the instinct to live is still there. What’s gone isn’t the will to live. It’s the feeling that your life means anything. But if all we do is just sit inside and feel obsolete within ourselves and see how awesome
Life is for other people on social media or wherever, it’s no wonder we don’t want to exist anymore. What kind of life is this that we’ve made for ourselves? always pushing our goals to the side and involuntarily giving them up to other people. If something doesn’t change, then we’re bound to end up just like the Crestfallen warrior. How do you reenter existence when you’ve already emotionally checked out? The Crestfallen warrior didn’t lose because he was weak.
He lost because he stayed still. Firelink Shrine feels peaceful. The bonfire is warm. You can sit there forever and tell yourself you’re just resting for now. But you can’t finish the game from Firelink Shrine. At some point you have to leave. Not because you’re ready, not because you feel motivated, but because staying there slowly erases you. And that’s what scrolling does to us. It gives us the illusion of rest while quietly dissolving our sense of self. No
Resistance, no risk, no feedback from reality. Scrolling mindlessly is a symptom of you basically robbing yourself from getting real life experiences. So when people say, “Why do I feel like I don’t want to exist anymore?” The answer usually isn’t that life is too painful. It’s that nothing is asking anything of you. Dark Souls taught me that you don’t stop going hollow by feeling better. You stop going hollow by moving towards something that can hurt you, a goal, a direction, a
Fight that you might lose, something uncomfortable, and that demands your presence. Existence doesn’t become meaningful because you think about it correctly. It becomes meaningful because you put yourself back into the world where things can go wrong sometimes. The crest fallen warrior didn’t need hope. You needed a reason to stand up. And so do we. So if you feel that desire to not exist, if you feel obsolete or invisible or like things are already too late, don’t ask yourself, why am I like this?
Why is this my life? Instead, ask yourself, what part of my life have I stopped participating in? Then leave the shrine. Even if it’s ugly, even if it’s slow, uncomfortable, hard, even if it’s blight town, because I feel like worse than pain is disappearing while you’re still alive. When was the last time that you did something that made you tired, exhausted even? You didn’t drink any water or have any food and you stayed up late to do it? Like you put off sleep
Because you just wanted to do it so bad. Find the things in your life that make you feel like you don’t care if you’re tired. You want to climb to the top of a mountain to see the view from up there. You want to stay up late building Legos or building computers or something like that. You want to go fishing and stay out there all day because of how calm and peaceful the experience is. And then if you catch a nice fish, then
You can have a nice fish dinner as your reward. These things don’t only have to be for like entertainment, like leisure. You know, you can find a sense of purpose through your work, your craft, but just put down your phone, stop scrolling. Give yourself time to think. Find the things that make your eyes actually light up just from the thought of it. And then get up and go do it. I know it sounds like a lot of work, but
Trust me, you’ll thank yourself for just getting up and going and doing it instead of just staying the same as you’ve always been, staying watching reals, scrolling. You’ll you’ll thank yourself for getting up and going and trying to do something. If you like Dark Souls and self-improvement, I have a new free community that you can join. It’s just going to be the link in the description. I also have a new course that’s like how to fix your life but
Explain with Dark Souls. So, you can also check that out with the link in the description. No pressure for either of them. Just if you want to check them out, then they’re there. Okay, you take care, guys. Don’t you dare go hollow.