Read This

 

You’re right that life isn’t fair. Because people are self-absorbed, yes. Because people are selfish, yes. We’re born into a world that we know, as soon as we become enough aware we know, we have to leave sooner or later.

 

And we spend that time trying to fill it with as many positive experiences as possible. That’s all we really want, isn’t it? Our day in the sun?

 

Well, we didn’t make the sun. I’m not religious, but I’m sure as hell we didn’t make the sun. Or the ocean. Or the mountains. Or the sky. You’re right; you didn’t choose to come into the world. You were born, your whole body already made. Your mother didn’t even make you, her body did after sex, which is something else none of us made up.

 

In fact, you caused extremely little of everything that’s happened to you. You didn’t make your friends, or any of the people you’ve met, they were just born. You didn’t make the food that you buy and eat every day. You didn’t build your house. You didn’t make the movies you watch, or the music you listen to, or the clothes you wear. You didn’t make the computer you type on or extract the energy needed to run it. You didn’t create the medicine that’s made your life a lot better than it could have been.

 

And how much work did you have to do to earn enough money for these things? A lot less than doing it yourself. In fact, you’ve gotten a pretty fucking amazing deal.

 

No, since the beginning of time humans have been working and surviving and discovering and having children so someone like you could be born, and live a decent life. So you could see the sun and the water, eat and drink, talk to and touch other people. Experience something that blows your mind, even just for a second, whether it’s a song or a smile or a feeling you never knew existed until you felt it.

 

Life isn’t a game, man. If it was, everybody loses in the end. It’s a gift.

 

You’re right that the good times are brief, just minutes sometimes in between months of monotony and pain. If that’s true, you might wonder why it’s worth going through all the general hurt. The answer is simply: that is the way the universe works. There are thousands, in fact probably millions of ways for things to go wrong. And very few ways they go passably, let alone wonderfully. Just think of your DNA.

 

Think of your life. Everything you’ve experienced. If you could make it so that it never happened- you never felt or knew anything- would you? Just erase it all. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. As much as most of my life has sucked, there are times (and I can count them on one hand) that I wouldn’t trade for anything. And maybe not everyone would think they’re that great, but they matter to me.

 

Yeah, I wish I could skip parts, like a tape, just fast forward through drudgery and emotional pain and sickness and disappointment and every crap thing that just happens because it happens to happen. And sometimes life turns into a living nightmare. But the only choice we get is all or nothing. In the whole universe. Ever.

 

And even though we’re all doomed to have our hearts stop, brains black out, and bodies turn to dust- the living will continue. You are but a link in the chain of consciousness extending back to some primeval forest, that will continue until our sun dies.

 

We all want adventure when we’re young, it’s the only way we can realize how much we want to find peace and live the good home life. We all want to taste the madness, the fever, the bright lights and pounding rhythm, sex, drugs, wild in the night, death and life all in one night. All we do we do because we must continue our line, we must survive and leave in the world our offspring before we die, because that is the only reason we exist.

 

Truthfully we live by the biological imperative, and the social imperative, because we live together or die alone. That is what it comes down to in the end: the choice of life or death, everything we do chooses to hasten death or delay it for a while and send new life to keep it at bay, passing the torch to burn bright against the forces of the night, the dark that seeks to overwhelm all things in despair and death and emptiness.

 

So we dance and scream and make love out of chemicals and fear, and wave our torches to keep away the wolves. Yet one by one, relentlessly, we are all pulled from the fire-circle into the darkness alone; and one day, we know, all the world will end, with a bang or whimper, and there will be only darkness over the surface of the deep.

 

We fantasize about eternal life, but that is not in the nature of life, it is not forever, it is a spark that flies upwards into the cold emptiness under the wheeling masses of gas and matter from which we were born, a spark that knows with a scream that it lives before it dies. We spend most of our time trying to forget our impending doom, a train speeding ahead with ever increasing velocity towards a cliff, and really, we can leave any time, unexpectedly.

 

We try to hide but we cannot from the fact of death and of our own evil that comes from madness, which comes from the painful beauty of existence. Why do we run? Why do we pretend that there is any meaning or victory other than the fleeting ones that we assign arbitrary meaning to? Why do we reject and compete against each other when we are all we have, so briefly, against the stark emptiness of the universe?

 

We do it because we, each of us, want our sparks to fly the highest, to come the closest to the galactic glory we imagine and yearn for and yet will always remain infinitely far from, no matter how high we go before we burned away like Icarus. But when we die, let us be like the athlete dying young; not in despair, but with fight and honor against the impersonal inevitability of fate.

 

Memento mori. But let the dead bury the dead. What you have you did not earn, the gears were set in motion long before your existance. What you have you can not keep, it will slip away like sand through your fingers. All you can do is that which is the basis for all life, and ensure that another generation will see the sun five, fifty, five hundred years from now.

 

And perhaps do what your ancestors did for you, and try to leave a world more worth living in than the one in which you were born.