Do you have to be alive?
For fuck’s sake, who needs you?
Do a quick calculation – if, God forbid, you died tomorrow, how many people will weep for you? Don’t count your parents who weep anyway because you don’t live in a way they approve, and you’ll be left with two or three nostalgically inclined dates you fucked but barely remembered even in life. And when you die, you won’t be able to appreciate them anyway. Because you’d be dead.
How many people will remember you?
The people who know you by your face and by your character are no more than a hundred. After a person like you dies, they’re all very shocked, so shocked, so very appreciative of the alive you and appropriately sad. But let’s not kid ourselves – they’re all damn happy it wasn’t them! A quiet joy takes over the living when they find out they were spared. This time.
In fact, the living remember the dead mostly because they themselves survived. Their sincere regret is always mixed with a ruthless desire to live. For you too!
Actually, you,
are you sure you’re alive?
Why do you think you are? Is there even a need to challenge this assumption – you haven’t procreated, you haven’t planted a single tree, and you haven’t built a house? Your dates shy away from you in a very peculiar way and disappear seemingly into another dimension – where you never meet them again. You’re just another blob in the filling of the world’s over-baked eclair.
You’ve been alive for 33 years, but in reality, in total, it has been only two weeks. Those two weeks at the beach, with that blonde, few years back. You’ve forgotten the name…
Do you REALLY need to go on?
Are you convinced that if you continue to live it’s better than if you didn’t?
Consider the others. At least the neighbors will be able to sleep peacefully when you’re gone – they’re sick of your Morrissey and The Matrix soundtrack.
Are you sure that if you fulfill your big hopes and dreams, if you immortalize yourself in your imaginary way, you won’t do more harm than Herostratus, Genghis Khan and Nero. Separately or combined?
What’s the point anyway?
After a few million (maybe a lot less) years, none of this will exist. The people we study in textbooks will have toiled in vain.
In fact, those who wrote books will have mixed their dust with the dust of the illiterates.
The great commanders, politicians and other brave people of history will be gone, because History will be over. Mozart didn’t need to write anything except maybe the Requiem. Einstein can no longer be immortal, in a sense. Leonardo Da Vinci will not exist. Leonardo DiCaprio – also. There’ll be no one left.
What then?
This, your life, is some kind of Las Vegas.
Colorful, miserable, sordid, full of surprises, misfortune and luck, a Vegas where you can play. Of course, you have to pay also. I don’t know if I’m right, but even in Vegas it gets boring after the first 33 years. Hellish boredom. Your life makes no sense – you just want to try something else. Or rather, you no longer want to try anything. You want there to be nothing.
And this can be arranged too – after all, in Vegas nothing is impossible.