QUESTION: What does the world look like to a goth?

Arbitrary:

For me personally. I've always been an outsider. (Politically and otherwise) I've always been a night owl. Always been a fan of dark fiction. (Sci-fi, sword and sorcery fantasy, monsters, horror) And a morose morbid sense of humor. Though I think everyone needs that in the current environment.

It definitely means different things to different people. But a lot of the culture does tie to rebellion at least initially. Both politically and socially. Deriving itself from from the original organic punk movement. Before it became a genera or just a style. Something in many ways goth etc has succumbed to.

Most older goths especially eldergoth strongly lean left. Whether they're full blown anarchist to the most socially liberal Democrat or Democratic Socialist you'll ever meet. It's all international or unintentionally rebellion against established societal and political norms. Though things are often much murkier for younger generations for me at least. I can't claim to know them well. But I'd like to think it holds true.

I just like the music.

Like all subcultures, it is largely arbitrary, at least to a lot of people. There’s an aesthetic code that informs how you present yourself, a cultural canon of music/art/film/literature (though with considerable debate), and a set of signifiers, which in this case come largely from horror fiction and mythology. As for the death/darkness thing, that’s a human universal, people have been commenting on the awareness of mortality and the inevitable end of all things in art, philosophy and culture for ages, and nodding to that is also a way of distinguishing oneself from the superficiality of mainstream society, with its brightly-coloured consumerist pep. A stance of affected despair/melancholy can be another accoutrement of this.

There are presumably goths for whom the stance does shade into actual depression, though if you’re seriously depressed, you might not have the motivation to lace up your knee-high New Rock boots and go to the club to shimmy spookily to the Sisters of Mercy. Then again, if you’re more mildly depressive, a subculture that acknowledges darkness may be more welcoming and accommodating than one that is relentlessly cheerful and upbeat.

I believe the word they are looking for is Thanatos.

Anyhow, I like the dark because I can see the light better.

The shadows of society are comforting and provide distance from the establishment

Also agree with Eldritch