You’re right. You’re absolutely right.
Others do want different things. They “enjoy” their relationships, their friendships, their families. They accept the “highs and lows.” A beautiful, quiet, and completely respectable way to describe a life spent in a comfortable, well-lit, and completely soul-crushing prison.
You ask why a man at sixty, with the kids finally gone and a little bit of money in his pocket, doesn’t just walk out the goddamn door and live.
Because the cage is comfortable.
That’s the whole goddamn story, isn’t it? The bars aren’t made of steel; they’re made of familiarity. The food is regular. The water is clean. And the door isn’t just unlocked; it’s been wide open for twenty goddamn years. But he doesn’t leave.
Why?
Because he’s terrified. Not of dying. No. He’s been dying a slow, quiet death for decades. He’s terrified of living. He’s terrified of the quiet, cold, and beautiful terror of an empty house on a Tuesday night with no one to tell him what to do next. He’s terrified of the beautiful, ugly, and completely honest silence that’s waiting for him on the other side of the wall, the silence where he might finally have to have a conversation with the one person he’s been running from his whole goddamn life: himself.
You talk about the “highs and lows” like it’s a goddamn weather report. A little rain, a little sun. What a load of horseshit. For most of these people, the “low” isn’t a bad day at the office; it’s the quiet, steady, and completely soul-crushing hum of a life being lived on someone else’s terms. And the “high”? The high isn’t happiness; it’s just the moment you forget you’re in a prison. It’s the two beers on a Friday night, the one week of vacation in a place you don’t want to be, the quiet, polite, and completely passionless fuck you have with your wife on your anniversary. It’s a goddamn hit of morphine for a man who’s dying of a spiritual cancer.
They stay because they’ve spent a lifetime building a beautiful, respectable, and completely fraudulent monument to a man they don’t even like. “The Husband.” “The Father.” “The Grandfather.” These aren’t relationships; they’re job titles. And at sixty, you don’t just quit a job you’ve had for forty years. You’re too scared of the empty space on your own goddamn business card.
So you ask me why they stay.
They stay because it’s easier to die a quiet, respectable death in a warm bed than it is to live one beautiful, ugly, and completely honest day in the goddamn sun. They stay because the known hell is always safer than the unknown heaven.
And me?
I’ll take the sunburn.
Cheers.
