“…i’ve been told by many that if i cant find something to live for, i best find something to die for.”

They got that from a movie.

People say things.

The first thing you should do is stop listening to idiots. Actually, the first thing you should do is learn how to identify the idiots as soon and reliably as possible, so that you can maximize the time you’ll give yourself to prepare for evasive maneuvers (or bracing for inevitable impact) to protect yourself from the collateral damage of their idiocy. Then stop listening to them. I suppose you have to listen to an idiot first, in order to identify one.

Or, just learn to identify “signs” that someone is not qualified to advise you. And if they aren’t qualified to advise, their opinion is not only useless to you, but is probably very annoying, unwanted, possibly hurtful, potentially damaging, and should rightfully be eliminated from your experiences. But that’s the hardest part, because lots of idiots don’t know they are, and it’s hard to get them to understand why they should refrain from any certain action, such as passively encouraging people to kill themselves by parroting catchy movie quotes they don’t even understand.

“get busy livin’, or get busy dyin’…” Morgan Freeman, Shawshank Redemption.

Maybe i want to exist and do nothing, and maybe i’m in no hurry to die, just because my life is ruined? Maybe i want to sit in secluded silence and just think, for 20 years. Maybe i want to take as much time as i can, to prepare to write a book that finally changes the world? Maybe it takes “another 20 years” to qualify myself for such an endeavor?

Maybe someone who wants to die at 20 (and 30, and 40, and 50…) is the only type of person capable of figuring out the right way to go about solving some of the world’s worst and most persistent problems? Maybe, like i’ve told people since i figured it all out, many years ago… it will take an entire lifetime, or more (i usually say “several generations,” but… being optimistic here), to fix what’s wrong with this world. It’ll go faster if we get more qualified minds working on it… but most of those few, it seems, believe it is too big and too difficult and too dangerous, and too few of the right people even exist, and too few of those who do, are unwilling to cooperate, or unable to contribute significantly, due to other personal obligations like families and careers… perhaps it’s not even possible… so they don’t even want to try… (because “look before you leap” is intended to help us identify and assess risk, as well as our relative likeliness of succeeding in any endeavor… and so, if we look, and we find conditions we believe will prevent us from clearing that gap… we don’t leap; unless we don’t care if we fall to our deaths)

It’s recursion cloaked in laziness… hiding something deceptively simple, but also profoundly complex, in plain sight. 😉

It’s “clever,” simply because it defines itself as such (while looking superficially similar to a “cop-out,” or even self-contradictory, because a clever name wouldn’t just… declare itself clever by default, would it? Or maybe it would? lol), simply because that’s the beginning i chose for it. It could have been “lazyname” or “stupidname” or “instantname” … and it indeed would have been true in all of those scenarios; but i chose “clever,” because i like word plays and clever names, and devote a lot more attention to correctness than do most people. (although i’ve been making more punctuation errors and word omissions than i’m comfortable with… but i try not to let perfectionism take over…)