Today, I want to talk about death. Why death, you ask? Well, frankly, it’s a subject matter that has always intrigued me. It intrigues me because most other people fear it yet deep down, everyone knows that they going to die. Maybe not right this moment but certainly when enough time has past or some random freak accident occurs, death will most certainly come.
I wouldn’t say that I think about death and dying on a day to day basis but I do tend to think about it when I’m drunk. At the immediate moment though, you can rest easy that I haven’t had a sip of alcohol yet. Nevertheless, I know that this thought is there. It’s waiting. Waiting for the right moment to spring forth and captivate my mind, my focus and my consciousness. Usually when this thought comes gushing out, I usually feel despair. Despair that all of this, life, these empty gestures to people, and the resulting effects it has on those people, that it’s all just a lie.
I am fully aware that I’m sounding like a character you may have remembered seeing or hearing in some epic movie or drama TV series but that’s precisely what I feel at that moment when it happens. Some people will insist that this is depression and that this “mental disorder” is the reason why so many are on medication to relieve them of these feelings of despair, of hopelessness and wanting to just ‘take that final nap’ and never wake up. Others may say that I’m experiencing burnout, which apparently is some lower tier version of a full blown depression. To me, why can’t it be just that I’m genuinely tired of life and really just want to go sleep and never wake up?
I was remembering a thought I had in one of my drunken stupors with Sam, my childhood friend, and I had expressed to him that I’m tired. Not just tired mentally and physically but tired spiritually and that I just wanted to stop living. Of course, my childhood friend insisted that life isn’t all that bad and that there’s just so much to live for, which I find kind of funny. I say this because growing up, he was that kid that was mad at the world, at his family, and his circumstances as well as all the bad hands that was dealt to him all throughout life. I was his hope at the time, ironically enough. But I was also going through issues myself. The death of both parents and experiencing that at a young age does take a toll on one’s psyche and it does affect how one view’s life going forward from there. Nevertheless, I was that beacon of hope for him and he was my anchor as well because I spent many weekends dumping a lot of negativity that I was experiencing and struggling with adapting to the fact that I didn’t have any living parents anymore.
Getting back to one of many drunken stupors where I had expressed to Sam that I’m done with life and I just don’t want to live anymore, well, I’m still here. And I have to admit that the will to live, that self-preservation instinct is real. It’s alive and well. And, if I recall correctly, a few years ago, I was writing about just this precise idea but I think I was making an argument for why life can be a beautiful thing while using self-preservation as the focal point of that. One after the next drunken stupor, I always pick myself back up and keep trudging forward like a trooper. I’m not sure what the end goal is anymore. All these attempts to save money for a retirement, save money to move up the social ladder, I just don’t see the point of it all other than meeting my biological needs. This meat bag that I’m carrying around is the only reason why I even bother waking up every day to go to work for a company that I don’t care for only to come home to work for another company, the family company, in hopes that it’ll make us some money so I won’t have to keep working for someone else to pay for things to keep up this biological body from breaking down and rotting from the inside out.
And what then when this family company does take off? What if the money does start rolling in? Then what? What follows from this? The same shit except now I get to buy more fancy food and clothing to repeat the same old thing until my biological body does give out due to age. All the days that I spent learning existentialism via all the famous western philosophers, Nietzsche, Kant, Kierkegaard, Hume, Heidegger, and on and on, and the best conclusion that I have arrived at is life is what you make of it (thanks to Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir) and that there’s no inherent or intrinsic value in the action themselves except when it’s in relations to others. For that matter, there is no external or extrinsic value of the same actions than them being a means to an end for a specific moment in time for a particular activity or circumstance. I’m living some form of nihilistic hedonism and I’m tired of this shit. At the same time, even if I was somehow able to scratch this itch, so to speak, it’s only temporary and that same hunger for more knowledge, for more pleasure, for more whatever returns and begs for more and more. It is a vicious cycle. A vicious cycle that cannot escape because I’m a meat bag with consciousness. Sadly, this consciousness cannot just will the hunger of the body away. At best, it can stave it off, if only temporarily.
It might sound perverse but I would be fine if I slept tonight and don’t actually wake up tomorrow…like ever. But until then, stay tuned for my next article.
Goo Wak Jai 