I could hear indistinctly from the distance, like an auditory hallucination, the voice of a little girl singing. Unhappiness. There are all kinds of unhappy people in this world. I suppose it would be no exaggeration to say that the world is composed entirely of unhappy people. But those people fight their unhappiness with society fairly and squarely, and society for its part easily understands and sympathises with such struggles. My unhappiness stemmed entirely from my own vices, and I had no way of fighting anybody. (..) Am I what they call an egoist? Or am I the opposite, a man of excessively weak spirit? I really don't know myself, but since I seem in either case to be a mass of vices, I drop steadily, inevitably, into unhappiness, and I have no specific plan to stave off my descent.
(..)
Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness.
Everything passes.
That is the one and only thing I have thought resembled a truth in the society of human beings where I have dwelled up to now as in a burning hell.
Everything passes.

// Osamu Dazai, 1948, No Longer Human