The boat analogy

Each of us has our own little sinking ship, barring any great sea tragedy, the ship will stay afloat on average about 74-78 years, maybe a lot less, and never that much more. Some people start out with bigger more expensive boats, others get smaller more ugly boats but it doesn’t matter… all the boats are sinking at roughly the same rate.

You see some people eating right and exercising, bailing hard and trying to patch the little holes with everything they got… it won’t matter, they may make it a few more years than the rest of us, but in the end they sink like everyone else, and they usually suffer more because of it.

A few people work their asses off trying to decorate their ships and gather as much expensive shit as possible on their boats, it won’t matter, pretty and rich sinks just the same as ugly and poor.

Some people dedicate their lives to picking up everybody else’s garbage and carrying it around on their boats while trying to talk everyone else into caring about the great mother ocean, or maybe talking about the great sea kingdom we all go to if we pick up some garbage before we drown. It’s useless, the ocean doesn’t give a shit, eventually it will kill them all too, and the great sea kingdom afterlife is a friggin lie.

A few sad folks just sit on their boats and cry and cry, lamenting all the unfairness, maybe even jump out of their boats to end it all early… people pretend it’s a big deal… but nobody really cares much for long, they got their own sinking to do.

Still other people tie their boats together and screw and party as much as they can in some attempt to have as much fun as possible before the bubbles come, in the end the parties won’t matter anymore than the crying did, it’s just a pointless waste of time like everything else is.

But a few of us, just a few, see what’s going on. We just sit, we don’t try and bail or patch, we don’t decorate or save garbage, we don’t try and party too much (just when sitting a little too long gets boring maybe). Mostly we just sit and smile at all the crazy shit people are doing all around us, it’s pretty funny if you can step out of all the sinking panic and just look, and when our boats do finally sink… those like me won’t rage or cry, we’re not attached to anything, not even the boat…. we’ll just be relieved.

To me that’s what it means to be an absurdist… you know that everything is pointless, and you know there’s no more reason to off yourself than there is to keep breathing, but your sorta driven to keep afloat, so you do, (maybe even just as a middle finger to the bubbles and/or the boat builder,) but without all the useless and overly dramatic attachments or frustrations everyone else seems to drag around with them.

I really don’t care that some self satisfied assholes see me as a failure, or other judgmental assholes think I’ve wasted my life, those are just more really stupid people who have bought into the illusion that anything at all matters when your on a sinking ship that you can’t stop from sinking. I’ll always have a much MUCH bigger smile on my face while sitting and watching those people sink…

So stop with the self-hatred, depression, and anxiety… Just sit, look, smile, be… you don’t need to do anything else, and nothing else you might do will make any difference anyway.