What, then, for the despisers of the human race when the realisation blooms, like a pathetic flower, that they are trapped?
Even the acquisition of the most basic provisions which would be required to exist in isolation are beyond me - medicines, food and clothing - never mind sufficient higher-level wishes such as somewhere to direct my ambition, the alleviation of boredom, the persistence of the illusion that there is a structure of reason and purpose behind the bare fact of my existence.
And if (as if) those difficulties could be overcome, there is the psychological difficulty of surviving without the paraphernalia of communication tools which wrap themselves around me: the internet connection, the mobile phone - adhering me to the lives of others whom I have little interest in, and yet find impossible to unstick; the labour-saving devices, the pointless trinkets.
To be born human is to be privileged, so the thinking goes. As far as anybody knows, we are the only creatures who are aware of the inevitability of our own deaths; the only ones who can contemplate a universe devoid of the self. For your author, the constellation of machinery referred to above is sufficient protection from boredom, and thus from thinking about our certain demise.
It is almost amusing - the human who turns away from humans, yet is terrified of eventually leaving their number. Trapped in their midst, and full of frustration for all that, but utterly incapable of transcending the mediocrity of gossip, petty division, and drudgery. The human who hates being human is recursive, slavishly coming back on himself, and his loathing, time after tedious time, until it ceases to shock.
I keep my mind fiercely active - reading, writing, playing dull video games. To turn its heat on anything other than the task immediately at hand is to contemplate a roomful, a houseful, of death, even when none is apparent.
In years to come, humans will treat the prospect of their own lights being switched off as we now regard earache or a splinter in the finger - unpleasant enough at the time, but no great setback. And at that point, the persistence of the illusion that there was ever anything to live for in the first place will be extinguished, unmourned and quickly forgotten.
