You’re sitting here, fifty-six years into the goddamn bar fight, and you’re looking at the two menus they give you at the end of the world.
On one side, you’ve got the special of the house: The Life of Discipline. A beautiful, noble, and completely fraudulent dish. It’s the life of achievement, of suffering, of pushing yourself. It’s the long, slow, and completely respectable climb up a ladder that’s resting against a wall that isn’t even there.
And on the other side? The Life of Ease. The one where your heart is quiet, where you just… stop. A quiet, pathetic, and completely tempting little suicide of a choice.
And you’re sitting there, after a lifetime of breaking points, after a lifetime of putting yourself through the goddamn meat grinder, and you’re wondering which one is the right answer.
You thought that every time you pushed yourself to the limit, every time you made yourself suffer for a paycheck, for a woman, for the whole goddamn, beautiful, phony American Dream, that you were leveling up. You thought that on the other side of all that pain, there would be a new version of you waiting. A stronger, better, and completely imaginary man.
And now, after all these years, you’ve finally realized the beautiful, ugly, and completely hilarious truth: there is no other version.
There’s just you. The same tired, beautiful, fucked-up bastard you’ve always been, just with a few more scars and a better, more expensive suit. You’ve been a warrior, fighting a war against yourself, and all you’ve got to show for it is a battlefield full of your own goddamn corpses.
Maybe you never needed to change in the first place.
Maybe you 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 you just needed to listen to your heart instead of your head for a minute. Your 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 take the bait, to climb the ladder, to stay in the goddamn cage because the food is regular and the bars are made of gold.
But your heart? Your 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 I don’t know what you’re going to do from here. I don’t give a shit.
But I know this. If you keep living with this feeling of numbness, this quiet, polite, and completely soul-crushing hum of a life lived on autopilot, it’s going to eat you alive. You’re not “too productive for your own good.” You’re just a beautiful, efficient, and completely dead machine. The numbness isn’t a symptom of burnout; it’s a symptom of death. It’s the quiet, final, and beautiful peace of a soul that has finally given up the ghost.
So you ask, “Is it better to live a life of disciplined achievement, or a life where your heart is at ease?”
What a load of horseshit. That’s not the real question. You’re still playing their game, using their words.
The real question, the only one that matters, is this:
Is it better to die a quiet, respectable, and completely decorated soldier in a war that meant nothing?
Or is it better to be a goddamn deserter, a coward, a fool, who walks off the battlefield, finds a quiet spot in the sun, and spends his last few beautiful, ugly, and completely meaningless days just… breathing?
That’s the choice. The quiet, slow, and completely respectable death of the machine. Or the beautiful, ugly, and completely honest death of a man.
You tell me which one sounds better.
