You think the sickness comes from the outside? From the job, from the woman, from the government, from all the other poor, dumb bastards who are just as lost as you are?
No.
The real sickness, the one that’s eating you alive from the inside out, it comes from the quiet, respectable, and completely soul-crushing business of letting your own goddamn soul rot while you’re still breathing. It’s the slow, ugly, and completely silent suicide of a life that has been lived on its knees.
If there is something in you, some wild, beautiful, and completely impractical thing that you want to do, some strange, uncharted country you want to explore, then for Christ’s sake, do it.
They sell you this idea that you are stuck. That the life you have is the only one you’re going to get. That the cage you’re in is a goddamn permanent structure. What a load of horseshit.
That’s the beautiful, ugly, and completely terrifying secret of the whole damn show: you’re not locked into a single goddamn thing. You have the privilege, the right, the goddamn holy obligation to start over. Not just once, but as many times as it takes. You are allowed to change. You are allowed to evolve. You are allowed to burn the whole goddamn house to the ground, walk away from the ashes, and start building something new on a different piece of dirt.
Every day is a new day. A clean page. A fresh bottle. You can make something different of it, if you just have the guts to strike the match.
So why do we believe we’re stuck?
Because it’s easier. It’s more comfortable. The cage is warm, the food is regular, and the quiet, predictable routine of our own misery is a familiar old friend. We’re terrified of the beautiful, ugly, and completely unpredictable chaos of a life that’s actually being lived.
But the chaos is always there, isn’t it? It’s just waiting for its moment.
You think nothing monumental can happen today? You think the script is already written? Christ. Something horrific could happen in the next five minutes. A phone call from a doctor with a sad, quiet voice. The squeal of tires and the sudden, beautiful, and completely final flash of light. Your whole goddamn world can be reduced to a pile of smoking rubble in the time it takes to pour another drink.
And just as easily, something amazing could happen.
That woman, the one you’ve been watching from the end of the bar for the last six months, the one you’re too scared to talk to? Maybe tonight’s the night you finally get up, walk over, and say something stupid, and it turns out she’s just as lonely and just as fucked-up as you are, and you end up spending the next three days in her bed, in a beautiful, ugly, and completely honest mess of sweat and cheap whiskey.
That Powerball ticket you bought at the gas station, the one with your birthday on it? Maybe you just won a billion goddamn dollars.
You see? Anything is capable of happening in this infinite, beautiful, and completely insane universe. It’s not just a possibility; it’s a goddamn statistical certainty. The universe is a drunk, sitting at the end of a long, dark bar, and he’s dealing the cards, and he doesn’t give a shit if you get a royal flush or a handful of nothing. He just likes the game.
And you, you’re sitting there, with a winning lottery ticket in your pocket, afraid to cash it in because you don’t think you deserve it.
I remember reading something from some old shrink, a guy named Jung. He was a smart sonofabitch. He laid out the whole goddamn diagnosis. He said the world is full of people suffering from the effects of their own unlived life.
The world is full of ghosts. Not the kind that rattle chains, but the quiet, sad, and completely ordinary ghosts of the men and women they were supposed to be. And these ghosts, they’re a miserable bunch of bastards. They become bitter, and critical, and rigid. They walk around with a permanent, sour look on their faces, like they just smelled a fart in a crowded elevator.
And it’s not because the world is cruel to them. No. It’s because they have betrayed their own inner possibilities. They’ve sold out their own goddamn soul for a quiet house in the suburbs and a pension plan.
The artist who never picks up a brush, who lets his canvases gather dust in the garage, he becomes a cynical sonofabitch who sneers at every painting he sees. He’s not critiquing the art; he’s mourning the death of the artist in himself.
The lover who never risks his heart, who never gets it broken in a beautiful, ugly, and completely necessary way, he mocks romance. He calls it a game for fools.
The thinker who never commits to a philosophy, who’s too smart and too scared to believe in anything, he sneers at belief itself.
And they suffer. Christ, how they suffer. Not because the world is cruel, but because deep down, in the quiet, ugly, and completely honest hours of a long, sleepless night, they know. They know that the life they’re mocking is the one they were supposed to be living. The laughter is just the sound of a man trying to drown out the sound of his own goddamn funeral.
That’s the sickness. A lot of the suffering in this world, it comes from that one, simple, and completely tragic fact: we don’t get to be who we were made to be. We let our souls, our purpose, the one, true, and beautiful thing we were put on this earth to do, just rot inside of us.
And you, you are the one thing in this whole miserable, beautiful, fucked-up world that you have any real control over.
So you have to make a choice.
Are you going to be another quiet, respectable, and completely dead casualty in a war you were too scared to admit you were fighting?
Or are you going to be a man? Are you going to stand up, pour a drink, walk out into the beautiful, ugly, and completely unpredictable chaos of it all, and see what the hell happens next?
