Lost faith in society

I know this might sound pseudointelectual, but in recent years/months I slowly lost all of the faith I had in the world around me. It made my life difficult. It's hard to do things if most of what you are expected to do you recognize as pointless or evil. Being with people is difficult if you see how much of behavior people exhibit is guided by both selfishness and ignorance. Not that I believe most people are bad. They aren't. But it's hard to deny my own eyes from the sight that there's this foam of people everywhere you go which act like parasites. They attach themselves to the host and suck the life of it. You find this a lot in corporate places. Usually with managers(-likes). They love to give meaningless babbles which actually are games they play to get on top of each other. You can spot them by seeing the passive aggression and fake niceness they exhibit. But it's not limited to that. You can find it everywhere. There this group of people with sociopathic tendencies which try to build a nest in every group. These feelings made me even feel bad about finding things such as love. From what I can see, lot of relationships are manipulation games too. When it comes to lovers, finding people who are just together because of monetary benefits is not hard. Or because one of the partners is delusional about the situation, so they stay together in a toxic relationships. Hell, not even relationship between a parent and a child is spared from that. I've noticed that lot of parents try to push their children and mold them into status symbols. I realized that happened to me by my parents. They are insecure about themselves, so when I was growing up they told guests who were visiting everything positive they could think of about me. If nothing positive was to be said, they made up a story and told that instead. This is just one part of what I started to see. And even of that, it's small part of all I have to say, but I didn't come here to write a novel. To return back to my main point, I just can't live in the world like it is. It disgusts me on an emotional level, and I've promised myself to stop lying to myself as much as I can. But once I came to this point, I realized I have nowhere to go. At least nowhere I can see just yet. I wish I could meet people who also wish, for lack of better words, "honest and non striving" way of life. This made me interested in certain things. From my lackluster knowledge, lot of native american cultures and ways of life like buddhism seem to be close to what I want, even though obviously both of these things are alien to me. I guess I feel as someone out of time and place. I don't fit in this world, and there doesn't seem to be a way to get to a world where I fit in. And I feel like trying to adjust myself to how things are nowadays would mean betraying myself. It's kinda like trying to believe in a tooth fairy after you realize the thing is a scam. You just can't do it. And I realized after years of getting my previous views challenged, that lot of what I see around me is wrong. but now what? I feel a bit lost

My hypothesis on this is that what you describe is a real consquence of overpopulation. When the population is low and natural resources are plentiful, people are more or less anarchic by nature because there's no reason to be anything else. As the population grows and natural resources begin to run out, people have to cope by making rules, having leaders, apportioning reasources more to some people, less to others, etc. At the late stage of overpopulation, like today, there are so many people that the average person lives in an environment of people, not of resources. So instead of learning how to exploit resources, they learn how to exploit people. This environment is ideal for the success of sociopaths, and they begin to flourish and take over, and treat other people as prey rather than fellow humans. It can only go on for so long before it all collapses. I think this is what causes "dark ages", like the bronze age collapse and the middle ages. Just my two cents. No real proof of it, but I strongly suspect that's what happens, and is happening now. Once you understand it, you can just consider yourself a human who happens to be living in a very interesting historical period. In spite of it, there are still good things to experience and good people to know.

>>39974 Inmy interpretation the way to live in the world you describe is to compartmentalise different sections of your life. I would wager it's because of the erosion of privacy and commodification of all personal things that is facilitated by social media and such, but people are really quick to judge other people and themselves as "parasites". If you only saw lions eating the antelopes you could also consider them to be parasites. But that's not all they do, they care for their offspring and are a part of the balanced ecosystem that would be in danger if they stopped doing their thing. The same with "parasite" people. They just accepted instinctively or consciously that the world we live in is a rat race and truly caring for more that like 10 people is not really sustainable so they just buckle up and play their role, be it the master or the servant. Then they go to their families and friends and act like decent people for the most part. At least that's what I observed. There are people who are truly gone and live all their lives in a petty power struggle like you describe but that's more of an aberration that stems from the huge changes the society faces no stop for the last few centuries. You would be surprised how many people who did abhorrent by our standards things were considered good friends and even loved ones by people close to them. They just compartmentalised. At least that's how I see it