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Heading Downhill
When I was younger I kept wondering when life was going to start. When would I start accomplishing the things I read about in magazines and newspapers? When would I start writing books, making scientific discoveries, inventing things, being famous? Little did I comprehend that time was passing me by. When I was in high school I followed NHL hockey for a while, and even then it did not dawn on me that those famous hockey players were just a few years older than me, that they had started down the road to hockey stardom years and years before.
Now I am old, and life still has not started. Furthermore, I have largely lost hope that it is going to start. Many of the people writing books/making discoveries/inventing things/being famous are my age or younger. Meanwhile I am stuck in a life of drudgery, and life is passing me by. People say that it is never too late to change, and they may be right; because I am afraid of commitment, I have few obligations weighing me down. However, in addition to letting the most productive years of my life pass me by I have lost much of my ambition. I have stopped believing that I can make anything of my life.
I maintain that this belief is defensible, regardless of whether it is true. As far as I can tell life consists of losing the things you value one by one.
I started losing my imagination at age 13. I lost my oblivious love of learning by second year university, and by fourth year I had lost confidence that I could handle academics. I lost my faith in environmentalism around 2000 or 2001. My intelligence -- once my most valued trait -- has been in steady decline for years. Now I am losing my vocabulary and my ability to express myself verbally. Although nothing serious has happened yet, my health is on the decline, and within a decade I could well face diabetes and chronic pain. At some point my parents will become frail, and then I will lose my independence. As the years pass, people who are close to me will age and die.
And what do I have to look forward to? Drudgery. I am stuck making my living as a sysadmin. Although I should be grateful for my job -- I cannot imagine a better one -- I feel isolated and unhappy, and many days I drag myself to the office only reluctantly. Work is so draining that I have little energy for anything else; I am writing this entry when I am supposed to be sleeping for work tomorrow. But in order to stay alive I need employment, and I should be grateful that I have such a cushy job. At some point (perhaps within the next year) my employment will end, and then I will be faced with the drudgery of looking for another job.
Then there is the drudgery of daily life. When I am not working there are chores to be done -- cooking, cleaning, laundry. I have to keep the rent paid, or face homelessness -- real homelessness, not the pretend kind I enjoyed in 1999. I am trying to take care of my teeth, so now I have to floss each and every day. I am trying to keep my weight down, so thanks to my slowing metabolism I have to eat less and less. Food has become my enemy and mealtimes a source of guilt. Because work is so time-consuming I have not been getting enough sleep, which is yet another drudgery to deal with.
My life is relatively simple. I don't have to take care of a house or children or a car or a relationship. But even my life is full of unpleasant -- albeit minor -- drudgery, and I am unconvinced that they are worth the bother.
Even my leisure activities feel unsatisfying. Community gardening can be enjoyable, but it is also full of disappointment when the groundhogs and deer decimate the crops. Every year I struggle with the decision to garden for one more year. The Linux User Group I help organize seems more and more irrelevant, and it has been torn apart by internal disagreement. Other user groups and talks can be interesting and occasionally inspiring, but it is a rare occasion when I feel the topic of a talk has made life worth living.
I suspect other people find life worth living, that they are compensated for the losses and drudgery in other ways -- travel, vacations, children, comforts, wisdom, and/or an enthusiasm for the future. Often for stupid reasons, I have rejected some of these compensations. Other compensations have passed me by.
These are nice problems to have, I guess. I recognize that I am incredibly fortunate to have (for now) clean water and plenty of food and a safe place to sleep and more income than I spend. Billions of people on this world cannot say this much. Tens of billions of living organisms on this planet suffer a great deal more than human beings do. Human life may be a precious gift, but so are free puppies -- sometimes the associated costs of "free gifts" are difficult to handle. In order for me to live a lot of other beings must suffer. I consume resources that might otherwise be used by other, more grateful people.
I used to believe that it would be enough if I had something to live for. I don't know whether I believe that any more or not. In some shallow sense I have a purpose: I work as a sysadmin, at a wage significantly less than the market will bear. Is that enough? Maybe it should be. It does not feel like enough, because I am greedy and selfish. And what purpose does my life have when I lose this job?
I fundamentally disbelieve that my life has any inherent worth. I have seen some evidence that I have influenced others, in both positive and negative ways. I do not know my net influence, but I suspect it is not good. I rather hope there is no Judgement Day.
I suspect there is some threshold after which life stops being worth living. I don't know what that threshold is. Is it when I become senile? When I am penniless? When I can no longer contribute to society? When life is no longer pleasurable? If suicide is no longer an option once I have crossed the threshold then maybe it is worth ending my life sooner. Situations change quickly -- I could be diagnosed with a debilitating disease, or maybe the Calamity will happen and we will be thrust into societal collapse and war. I believe in such negative circumstances a lot more than I believe in a bright future.
As Thoreau wrote, I am living a life of quiet desperation. I do not feel I have much to look forward to in life, but I trudge through my days anyways. I might be fooling myself -- maybe I secretly love life, and the satisfaction of getting jQuery to open a teaser in Drupal makes life worth living. Maybe my natural depressive tendencies will always win out, and I will always feel that life is unpleasant no matter how good things get.
Maybe the Christians are right, and I will continue feeling unhappy until I get over my pride and accept Jesus with all my heart. Maybe the Muslims are right and I need to submit to God and follow the Koran faithfully. Lots of religions claim to know why life is worth living, but their answers boil down to "because God said so", which begs the question. Those religions may be right, but I have not trusted that answer yet and I suspect I won't in the future.
I still have enough freedom and options and youth that I could change the direction of my life. Doing so would take energy, initiative and some hope for a better future, all of which are in short supply these days. I'm tired, and I don't know how much longer I want to keep going on. One day my life is going to end whether I want it to or not; the question is whether I have enough interest and initiative to participate in that event.