You ask me, “Can you fail at life?”
Christ. That’s the wrong goddamn question. That’s the question they teach you in their quiet, respectable, and completely soul-crushing schools. It’s the question that keeps the whole beautiful, ugly, and completely fraudulent show on the road.
Life isn’t a test you can fail. It’s not a game you can win. It’s a bar fight in the dark. It’s a horse race where all the horses are lame and all the jockeys are drunk. It’s a beautiful, ugly, and completely meaningless circus, and the only real failure is to sit in the stands and watch, a quiet, respectable, and completely dead-eyed spectator.
They sell you this idea, from the day you’re born, that it’s a conquest. An uphill battle. A mountain to be climbed. And they hand you a list of all the shit you’re supposed to drag up that mountain with you.
Layers and layers of it. A thick, heavy, and completely suffocating blanket of bullshit. You’re supposed to gather a treasure chest of materialistic trophies, a pile of shiny, useless junk, just to prove to your parents, to the neighbors, to a world that doesn’t give a shit, that you’re a “good boy.” Look at me, Ma, I got the new car. Look at me, Pop, I got the corner office. A beautiful, pathetic, and completely honest performance for an audience that’s already left the theater.
And the money. Jesus. The money. I remember when I made my first thirty grand a year, and I felt like a goddamn king. For about six months. And then I was broke again. Then it was forty, then fifty, then eighty, then a hundred and fifty. It’s a beautiful, perfect, and completely insane machine. They just keep moving the goalposts. It’s a thirst they’ve engineered into you, a beautiful, unquenchable, and completely soul-crushing thirst for a drink that will never satisfy you. It never, ever ends.
And it fucks with you in ways you don’t even see. You spend your whole life chasing their carrot, and you think that’s the game. You set these big, beautiful, and completely arbitrary goals, and you reach for them. And you fail. Of course you fail. The game is rigged. Your body gives out, your mind gives out, but you keep trying. You keep pushing the goddamn boulder up the hill, because that’s what a good soldier is supposed to do. You keep trying, and you keep failing, and you keep trying, until you get to a point where you’re just a bloody, broken, and completely exhausted mess at the bottom of the hill, and you realize the whole goddamn thing was just… stupid.
I’ve had my own recent “failures.” These big, beautiful plans to build a new empire, to be a new man. And I pushed, and I pushed, and I just… broke.
And in that beautiful, ugly, and completely honest moment of surrender, I finally saw the truth.
I wasn’t failing at the game. I was just finally, after fifty-six years, getting smart enough to quit playing.
I thought every time I pushed myself through the fire, every time I made myself suffer, that there would be a new, better version of me on the other side. A quiet, respectable, and completely imaginary man who had finally figured it all out.
And all I’ve realized is that maybe I never needed to change in the first place.
Maybe I just needed to take a deep breath. Not the quiet, gentle, and completely bullshit kind they sell you in the yoga studios. No. I’m talking about the deep breath a man takes after he’s been underwater for too long, the ragged, desperate, and beautiful gasp for air that reminds him he’s still alive. The breath you take when you finally stop pretending.
Maybe I just needed to listen to my heart instead of my head for a minute. My head, that’s the project manager, the accountant, the quiet, respectable, and completely castrated little bastard who’s been running the show for fifty-six years. He’s the one who tells you to keep pushing the goddamn boulder.
But my heart? My heart is a drunk, sitting in the corner of a dark bar, and it’s been whispering the same, simple, ugly, and beautiful truth to you your whole goddamn life: “This is all bullshit.”
And that brings me to my independence. November 11th. The day the last chain, the last beautiful, ugly, and completely fraudulent obligation of a life I never really wanted, finally rusts through and breaks.
That’s not just the end of a child support payment. That’s the day I’m officially allowed to let go of the goddamn boulder.
And the spiritual enlightenment, the quiet, beautiful, and completely hilarious punchline to the whole fifty-six-year-long joke, is this:
The point was never to get the boulder to the top of the hill.
The point was to get strong enough to let it go.
Life isn’t a game you can win or lose, pass or fail. It’s a beautiful, ugly, and completely honest joke, and the only way to get it is to realize you were never supposed to take it seriously in the first place.
So you ask me what I’m going to do now.
I’m going to do what Sisyphus should have done in the first place. I’m going to sit down at the bottom of the hill, I’m going to pour myself a drink, I’m going to light a cigarette, and I’m going to watch that beautiful, ugly, and completely meaningless sonofabitch of a boulder roll right back down to where it belongs.
And I’m going to laugh. A real, ugly, gut-shot laugh. The laugh of a man who is finally, beautifully, and completely free.
