I was broke, depressed, living with my parents, unemployed, and my main friend was a schizophrenic guy on lithium who lived with his dad and smoked weed—I shall call him Ratcliff.

We became friends because we played Warcraft 3 together online. He was quite skilled at it and I knew I could trust him as a leader.

My main pleasure in playing the game was marveling at the beautiful character designs and environments, and as a result of being absorbed in these visions, I couldn’t quite muster the ruthless efficiency that a strategy game demanded—minute tactical decisions of where to deploy units and for what purpose.

Ratcliff knew how to play for real, but his unusual strategy of perching and towering gave me great delight. Towering means barricading yourself with towers so that the match can drag on for hours, something most people hate to do, since they’re grinding the chart trying to rack up wins and get a higher level.

For Ratcliff & I, the task was the opposite—we welcomed every loss, since that would pair us up with less competent players who wouldn’t be familiar with our tricks. Torturing their sense of competitive urgency gave us delight, which peaked while perching.

Perching was an extension of the towering troll, and involved the rare luck to get the Highperch map. When the enemies destroyed our main base on the ground, they’d try to find out why they weren’t awarded a win, and after a while they’d stumble on our secret stronghold and notice that we had sunk our entire wealth on defending a tiny base on top of a perch tucked away at the edge of the map.

Their indignation at losing to such silliness meant we could sit back, relax and enjoy fending off countless attempts at destroying our perch. Our enemies would hurl insults at us to try and shame us for besmirching the honorable code of war, though this only inflamed our determination.

To reliably stir up such mad hatred in opponents is now a great source of shame—though the laughter was fun.

One of the cruelest people I’ve met online was part of the perching community—a boy I shall call Oskar. He tried to pursue Ratcliff’s sister romantically and was even taken in as a boarder at their home for a time.

He was unusually malicious, and I later learned that Oskar’s own parents, who were evangelical Christians, had permanently cast him out for rejecting their faith. With nowhere to turn, he fixated on a single idea—he had, as he obsessively claimed, perfect genetics. Now that I knew his past, this took on a haunting significance. It was as if, having been stripped of spiritual worth by those he trusted most, he clung desperately to the one thing they could never take from him: his physical, material self. If the soul was unwanted, then the body had to be holy.

I can only imagine what it does to a person to have their soul treated as worthless. Perhaps cruelty was the only thing left to him. Indeed, whenever I catch myself fantasizing about violent revenge, it is always in moments when I, too, feel like I don’t matter—when my pain is treated as if it’s worthless.

Besides escaping into the fantasy world of Warcraft, my other solace was being at the library and browsing books—inside an ugly building in an ugly location that nonetheless had peace and quiet and lovely large windows that let in lots of light.

There was a small section on the second floor dedicated to philosophy and religion, which was thankfully very low in traffic. Most of the books were untouchable woo of the highest order, but I enjoyed exploring, and when I grabbed the Quran, what spoke to me was the unparalleled beauty of its graphic design. Every single Arabic page was typeset and decorated with a level of care that set it apart from every other book, an attention and sensitivity to detail that screamed: this matters.

After being entranced by its beauty, I grabbed it and went off to visit Ratcliff— who routinely insulted and mistreated me, but I tolerated it because I figured that it’s what Jesus would have done. The meaning of morality was a dark cloud of ignorance in my mind, so I resorted to picking out sentiments floating around in my mind based on intuition. Something about Christ felt right—there was a simple beauty in the idea of treating everyone as if they mattered.

After all, I felt hurt when people treated me like I don’t matter, and it was clear that other people became evil when they were treated like they’re worthless—

So: logically, we must treat others like they matter even if it’s hard, I thought, because it’s a good thing to do. In practice it felt like getting progressively more drained—resentful—hateful—hopeless——with no apparent change on the horizon.

On the bus ride to his place, I read the English translation of the Quran, and felt grievously disappointed; one parochial banality after another, clumsy commands, obfuscation, ignorance.

Another disappointment. Onward to Ratcliff’s place. His life revolved around getting high, playing games, binging on shows and movies, and gorging on hyperpalatable food.

When I arrived, his father was pacing, glancing at the clock, waiting impatiently for the pizza delivery—a food I saw as a grotesque parody of nourishment but ate anyway, out of necessity—a bus fare to his suburb was an extravagant expense for me.

Ratcliff had his bong ready on the table. At last, I could lift my spirits for a moment. As the rush of the drug took hold, my senses sharpened—and so did my awareness of everything around me.

Everything became profoundly uglier—the passive consumption of entertainment products designed to hack attention; the cold fluorescent light of the kitchen; the fat gut on his gluttonous and impatient father; the wretched pharmaceuticals neutering so-called schizophrenic minds; the quick-buck food industry that poisons everyone; the cracked grey asphalt streets; the bus crammed with somber, hateful faces; my family & relatives who saw money & comfort as the pinnacle of life—everything and everywhere just ugliness and utter, utter ugliness. My cup spilled with hatred for the world.

The only beautiful thing that I could remember was the Quran, but not quite its words or meaning—it was a symbol pointing to something greater—what? Something.

I felt it in the deepest part of my being: whatever that was pointing to was real and true. This miserable excuse of a society in front of me was just a passing illusion. Burning in hatred, I found eternity—albeit in the form of a strange inversion.

It’s been about 15 years since that experience, and the main change in the intervening years has been the faith that the ugliness is inside rather than out.