I spent years learning to like people and ended up hating them anyway

I’ve spent my whole life feeling superior as a form of self-protection — protection, that is, of the idea I had of myself. I didn’t want people getting close enough to prove that I wasn’t the grand, singular, brilliant person I believed I was. Then, a few years ago, I went through a series of things that forced me to grow. I started opening up to anyone — people unlike me, especially people unlike me, people I wouldn’t have considered “at my level” (or so I liked to believe). And I discovered that everyone had something to give me, precisely because I was no longer interested in relationships as a transaction, no longer in it for the return I’d been extracting all along: validation of myself.
Now, after years of meeting every kind of person imaginable, from every corner of the world, in every register — from the most superficial acquaintance to genuine friendship — I’ve circled back to the same conclusion: I don’t like people.
I don’t like them. They make me feel sick.
I can hear their thoughts. I can see the machinery running behind their faces. Everyone relates to everyone else for their own gain: they’re terrified of dying, and the only thing that convinces them they’re worth something is the way they position themselves in relation to other people. Everyone wants validation, constantly, just to believe their existence adds up to something. My whole idea of life is built on figuring out who I am, what I could become. For two years I told myself: it doesn’t matter if other people don’t have this kind of inner search. Take them as they come. Not everyone has the privilege of getting to think about these things. I can’t do it anymore.
The most spontaneous, most genuine people I’ve met are, in the end, just the sum of what happened to them. The world — which as far as I’m concerned is completely fucked — speaks constantly through them. Goodness doesn’t matter. Kindness doesn’t matter. And I’m not even talking about the truly terrible ones, the ones with their “consensus-approved success,” brains entirely rotted through. The problem is that even the best people I know are slaves to mechanisms I find putrid. So where am I supposed to run?
I walk into a room and I feel all of it at once: the expectations, the little validation games, relationships conducted like balance sheets. And I’m good at pretending not to see it. I’m good at being likeable, at understanding. But the truth is I’m exhausted. Every evening spent with the finest people you could hope to meet — people who, God knows, are less broken than most — ends the same way: I get home and think I wish I’d never left the house. This makes me sick. It makes me sick. I want to be alone.
People have nothing — nothing, nothing — to say to me. I feel permanently saddled with everyone’s emotional weather, because it seems like I’m good at reading them, which means I can shape myself around them — but the truth is I don’t care about them at all. And i really wish I could care about them. But I’ve become a misanthrope. Cynical. Instinctively, involuntarily uninterested in other human beings. I don’t want to leave the house anymore. There is nothing in any of them that interests me.
I’m twenty-five years old, and I’m frightened of what that means for the rest of my life.