The sun is already a pale, indifferent bastard, climbing over the mountains and shining a light on all the dirt and the quiet desperation of another day. My ankle aches from a run yesterday, a dull, stupid throb. My head hurts from a drink I had last night. My heart hurts from a life I’ve been dragging around for fifty-six years.
And in the middle of all this quiet, beautiful, and completely ordinary pain, I’m thinking about the two words they’ve tried to sell us as a goddamn curse: Pain and Sacrifice.
They’ve built a whole religion around avoiding them, haven’t they? A soft, comfortable, and completely soul-crushing church where the only sacrament is a pill and the only prayer is for a life without a single goddamn scar. They sell you comfort. They sell you safety. They sell you a warm, well-lit, and completely passionless room to die in.
And you buy it. You all buy it. You trade your life for a long, slow, and comfortable suicide, and you call it being “responsible.”
Let’s talk about Pain.
There are two kinds of pain in this world. And you have to make a choice.
The first is the pain of the rust. It’s a quiet, dull, and creeping thing. It’s the pain of the job you hate, the one that’s been eating your soul one paycheck at a time for twenty years. It’s the pain of the loveless marriage, the quiet, simmering resentment that hangs in the air between you and the stranger you sleep next to. It’s the pain of looking in the mirror and seeing a fat, tired, and completely defeated man staring back at you. It’s the pain of all the things you didn’t do, all the words you didn’t say, all the chances you were too scared to take. It’s the pain of a life that has been lived on its knees. It doesn’t scream; it just… aches. It’s the quiet, cold, and completely passionless pain of the morgue.
Then there’s the other kind of pain. The pain of the fire.
It’s a sharp, honest, and beautiful pain. It’s the pain of tearing a muscle in the gym, the clean, hot burn that tells you you’re getting stronger. It’s the pain of a real heartbreak, the kind that rips your goddamn chest open and leaves you gasping for air, not the slow, quiet fizzle of a dead marriage. It’s the pain of being rejected for who you really are, not for the polite, phony mask you wear to get by. It’s the pain of walking away from a life that’s killing you, even if it’s the only life you’ve ever known. It’s a sharp, honest, and beautiful pain. It’s the pain that reminds you that you’re still alive.
The world is full of people who are terrified of the fire. So they choose the rust. They choose the slow, quiet, and completely respectable rot. And they call it a life.
And that brings us to the other word they’ve poisoned. Sacrifice.
They’ve turned it into a goddamn weapon. They sell you this idea of sacrifice as a noble, beautiful thing. You sacrifice your dreams for your kids. You sacrifice your passion for a steady paycheck. You sacrifice your own goddamn soul for a quiet house in the suburbs.
That’s not sacrifice. That’s a goddamn hostage negotiation. And you’re the one with the gun to your own head.
That kind of sacrifice, the one they sell you in church and on daytime television, it’s just a slow suicide that breeds resentment. You become a martyr. And a martyr is a miserable, passive-aggressive sonofabitch to be around. You start keeping score. “I gave up my life for you,” you whisper to your kids, to your wife, a quiet, ugly poison that seeps into the foundations of the house and rots it from the inside out. You’re not a hero; you’re just a coward who’s found a noble-sounding excuse for not having the guts to live his own goddamn life.
The real sacrifice, the only one that matters, the only one that’s worth a damn, is the one they don’t talk about. It’s the sacrifice of the man you are for the man you could be.
It’s the sacrifice of your comfort. It’s the sacrifice of your safety. It’s the sacrifice of your reputation. It’s the sacrifice of being liked by all the comfortable, happy, and completely dead people. It’s the sacrifice of being “right.” It’s the sacrifice of your own goddamn ego, that loud, scared, and completely useless bastard who’s been running the show for too long.
That’s the sacrifice that’s required to “go all the way.”
It’s the sacrifice I’m making right now, planning this escape to Argentina. I’m sacrificing the known, the comfortable, the predictable. I’m sacrificing the fat paycheck, the easy lay, the quiet desperation of a life I’ve already figured out. I’m taking the whole goddamn architecture of the man I’ve built over fifty-six years, and I’m lighting a match. I’m burning it down to the goddamn ground.
Why?
Because I’d rather feel the sharp, honest, and beautiful pain of the fire than the dull, quiet, and completely soul-crushing pain of the rust. I’d rather make a real sacrifice, the one for my own goddamn soul, than die a quiet, respectable martyr in a cage of my own making.
So you have to make a choice.
You can choose the dull, rotting pain of a comfortable sacrifice, or you can choose the sharp, holy pain of a real one. The choice isn’t between pain and pleasure; it’s between two different kinds of pain. One is a tombstone, the other is a goddamn engine.
The world is full of men who have chosen the rust. You see them every day, in the grocery store, in the traffic, in the mirror. Their eyes are dead. Their souls have been in the ground for years, buried under a tombstone that reads, “Here Lies a Man Who Was Always Comfortable.”
So I’m asking you. I’m begging you. Look at your life. Look at the cage you’ve built for yourself out of your own fear. Look at the quiet, comfortable, and completely soul-crushing routine of your own slow death.
And then ask yourself one last question.
Which pain are you going to choose?
Because you’re going to have to choose one.
