Two things:
A problem with modern society is that to an extent, you feel like you're in a constant battle with the other people around you. Your boss isn't on your side. Everyday you go to work there is the potential of life altering conflict which is ultimately not really in your control. Your company could simply decide to downsize. Through some misunderstanding some idiot with power over you could suddenly decide to destroy. At any time you can be ruined. And you try and try to worry about such things. All, usually, while being stuck in a situation where you can't actually do anything.

And at the same time you then go home in your metal box to your stone or wood box and are otherwise highly isolated.

In comparison, go back to a 'simpler' lifestyle. A farming community. Each ...group/family is relatively self sufficient, which is to say, they go out and plant the seeds, etc and survive off that basis. It really isn't that difficult. There isn't the (at least I surmise) potential of life altering conflict with people who essentially have total power over you on a daily basis.

I read once that actually they had to work so much harder on farms and we're living in luxury today in comparison. This isn't really true. Scott Nearing went off into the wilderness and carved out a good life (he wrote a book called Living the Good Life) for 50 plus years; living to be 100. He said they worked for four hours a day. And this work again, was not the stressful stuff it is in our modern society.

Humans aren't meant to have so much stress on a daily basis. Perhaps occasionally. From evolution there had to be occasional conflicts, fights, tribal wars. But what we have today instead ruins health. Causes unhappiness. Causes mental illnesses. Despite attempts by the sick psychiatry system to make mental illness sound like it's genetic in origin, we know for example that the rate for schizophrenia is much higher in big cities. Why this is I can't say for sure. Perhaps people have hypothesized it's from excessive pollutants? I think though it could just be people put in more stressful situations, more often having to deal with other people, whom they don't consider on the same 'side' and thus instead have to deal with as potential threats. Endless potential threats, more stress, slowly wearing them down.

There would still be conflict in a society where people were more self sufficient. There would still be stress. But it seems it wouldn't need to be such a consistent daily thing.

There is then furthermore the potential isolating factors of all the technology we use. Sitting alone in the dark in front of the TV with what little free time we have (and we have too little free time, we're hardly only working 4 hours a day like Nearing). And the fact we live in one place and then spend half our waking time at some other place far away where we're usually around no one who lives where we actually live.

And so on. All of which isn't to say going back to an agrarian lifestyle would mean instant utopia. I'm sure it's very possible for that to be miserable. But I think we could recognize that from such a lifestyle which is more suitable for the psychology of man and try to incorporate it into how we're living.
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So many books have characters who are in effect caricatures. I think, in a way, this is not a bad thing perhaps. It is maybe kind of like more generalized efforts to take complex human interactions and simplify them into something that is more easily understandable (while not totally losing all truth in the simplification process). And such books with antagonists that stray in the direction of being two dimensional. And in general characters that just aren't as complex as real life people, isn't necessarily a bad thing. It maybe can serve the same purpose in a way.

OK so I showed up for my RN board exam yesterday, a very crucially important bit of flaming hoop chop chop and whoopsie! I forgot my all important 27b-6 form. Can't take the test without it. Sorry! :)

But I just knew it. There's always something like this. It's like a predictable plot in some B movie. It's old and tired.

So it's about a 35 to 40 minute drive back home and I have 60 minutes exactly to get there and back with this paper. I had to park far away and run to my car like a little... I don't... animal... slave with a whip at my back. I'm supposed to be frantic but there's a part of me that's not capable of letting myself be affected that way.

I'm just stoic.

Torture me, etc. You might make me angry, (although I've gone further than anyone I've heard of in trying to eradicate such emotions). You might put me on constant edge for years. But that's just a sort of low grade stress... real fear, no. I don't play that. I laugh or just sit stonily like Spock.

So I hobble/run to my car as my knee has been hurting.

In the car and off speeding on the highway at an average speed of 90 miles per hour.
An old cd of my music happens to be playing. How about this?

No, that's no good. LOL. That's just heightening the stressful feelings.

How about this:

No! That just heightens the primary feeling I have about this, which is one of just being tired of this crude mere survival. I am just tired of such games.
But this one?

Yes, that works. I let it repeat a few times at least as I speed along. Of course my speeding causes road rage in a few other drivers who try to go as fast and cut me off, etc. I need a gun that shoots bananas... (Road rage is absurd.)

Why does this song work? There's something grand about it. I can't explain it. It was written randomly. Outside of rational thought.

But unfortunately it lurks in the back of my mind a good part of the time. Both a good thing and a bad. So now that I'm in the perfect frame of mind I take this test and it shuts off at the minimum number of questions which means there's about a 99% chance I passed. (They don't immediately tell you because they're afraid someone who fails might go nuts there.)

The idea that I might have failed is so ridiculous that to entertain it as a possibility does maybe cross over into mental illness. I once scored in the 99.85% on the GRE (relative to the population at large, not limitied to people who take the GRE). I missed the triple nines society by I think one question. Last week I had just gotten some other standardized test they made us take of roughly 100 questions. I was hoping for a perfect score on it... I missed 1.

But I really do think I could have failed. Because it seems that's the sort of life I've had.

Surely it isn't that bad really... but ultimately I do think I'm stuck in a low grade nightmare. (Although negative to the point of 'nightmare' primarily not with respect to my luck but just to what I see all around me. What acceptable behavior is, etc.) And I feel I've had to be an unfeeling piece of steel in the face of it. While at the same time managing to be pseudonormal as such thoughts mean I'm not well adapted. I'm the anomie. I'm the outsider. In our monkey society I'm to be ostracized, unfed, etc.

Of course I did pass.

I can now actually relax, for the first time in over a decade I think. I surely couldn't relax while getting my BS, MS and working on my PhD and for that paranoid schizophrenic at Los Alamos. I couldn't relax while unemployed for a year. (Have to get a job, a jobbie job!!) I couldn't relax through nursing school. Ridiculous subjective tests along with at first feeling very very out of place...

Now, I suppose, I can finally relax. I only work three days a week. I can stay up all night and read some escapist fiction if I want. It may take a while to kick in. Maybe it's been so long I'm not capable of it. Hopefully not. Although I expect I'll mostly always be held back by the knowledge of how bad others still have it.

So anyway, I've got an easy life then. Really I do. Most people don't. Most either have to work much harder or have to worry a lot more about money. Not to mention romantic troubles, physical problems, etc.

It can take days to retrieve a lost thought or months or of course it can just be permanently lost and memory is a hell of a thing. I had an analogy to death about winning an all expenses paid vacation to wherever you liked with one catch: you'd have no recollection at all of the vacation as soon as it was over. Would you go? If you say no, are you really an atheist? (Of course then people just lie and so on and I don't bother ever actually asking anyone the question.) To know that you are going to forget everything you ever do or think makes bothering to do anything utterly futile and thus one must not really be an atheist.

But actually we're all constantly forgetting so much. We don't have to wait to die for that. A person could really sit down and think this through and be horrified. Right now, what you're doing: it's partially futile as you're almost certain to utterly forget this moment and this day. (Still, surviving it isn't futile.)

It's a sort of death then happening to you daily? Yes? Yes? No.

You could get video cameras and put them everywhere and record every second of your existence. Or we could develop perfect memory. And then what? All those memories are no good unless you're remembering them. But the longer you live, the more and more memories till you just sit around remembering, all the time; no longer actually living; just reliving.

So what could you do to make absolutely sure you remember this moment forever? You could do something incredible stupid and destructive. Or write an extremely detailed blog post. Or face that day after day the details just aren't important. It's the overall flavor I guess that's at least hopefully worth remembering.

...and when we remember we actually don't retrieve, we recreate the memory. I have a habit of wondering, "What if actually I did it slightly different in some very bad way?" Then, I recreate the memory in that negative way and wonder which was the way it actually happened. It's a way to put yourself constantly on trial; to persecute yourself, like K.

While you're at it, you can imagine future encounters but with negative what ifs. What if someone with power over you decides to destroy your life? Or just do this or that negative thing to you? What will you do?

Did you act corretly here? And here? What will you do if such and such happens. Etc.

You can wear yourself out. But to some extent you have to do the above. Because you have to be prepared and most of us really are on the chopping block at any given moment.

I'm almost completely unstressed at the moment. Tuesday I'll do badly on the test I didn't study for and then get a bit stressed, more or less till May/June, when hopefully I'll get a job in my new career, etc. During that time the stress will probably do bad things to me. In finding ways to counterbalance I'll probably act in ways that seem stupid here and there. I suppose because on top of it I refuse to think this the best of all possible worlds. Instead I then do the opposite and search and search for the essence of what's wrong with this one.