Listen up, you beautiful, fucked-up bastards.
I want you to look around. Not just at this shitty little room you’re sitting in, but at your whole goddamn life. Look at the cheap furniture you bought on credit, the clothes in your closet you think define you, the car in the driveway that you’re working a job you hate to pay for. Look at the woman sleeping in your bed who you haven’t had a real conversation with in five years. Look at the man in the mirror, the one with the dead eyes and the quiet, simmering desperation.
You are not special.
You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You’re the same decaying organic matter as everything else, just wrapped in a slightly different package.
They sold us a bill of goods, didn’t they? They handed us the blueprints for a palace, a beautiful, shining monument to the American Dream. And we looked at those plans, our eyes all wide and stupid and full of hope, and we got to work. We did what they told us. We went to school, we got the job, we bought the house, we had the kids. We followed the goddamn instructions.
And now, here we are, fifty-six years into the project, and we’re standing in the middle of a goddamn shithole. The foundation is cracked, the pipes are leaking, and the whole damn thing smells of quiet, respectable rot.
I see all this potential, and I see it being squandered. God damn it, an entire generation of men, the strongest and the smartest who’ve ever lived, and what are we doing? We’re pumping gas. We’re waiting tables. We’re sitting in little gray boxes, staring at glowing screens, slaves with white collars, slowly, quietly dying one spreadsheet at a time.
Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re filling the empty rooms of our empty lives with cheap, plastic furniture from a goddamn catalog, hoping that if we just buy the right couch, the right watch, the right goddamn brand of toilet paper, we’ll finally feel something. Anything.
We’re the middle children of history, man. We have no purpose, no place. We have no Great War to fight, no Great Depression to endure. Our Great War is a spiritual one. Our Great Depression is our own goddamn lives.
It’s the quiet, grinding, and completely soul-crushing war against our own apathy. It’s the deep, hollow depression of a life lived without a single, goddamn, honest-to-God moment of real, beautiful, ugly passion.
We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly, quietly, and painfully learning that fact.
And we’re very, very pissed off.
But we’re quiet about it, aren’t we? It’s a polite, simmering rage that we swallow down with our morning coffee and our evening beer. A quiet, respectable desperation.
And that’s where they get you. That’s how they keep you in the cage.
You see that warning label on the side of the pack of cigarettes? The one that tells you this shit will kill you? Life should have one of those. It should be tattooed on the inside of your goddamn eyelids, so it’s the first thing you see every morning.
Warning: If you are reading this, then this warning is for you. Every word you read of this useless fine print is another second off your life.
Don’t you have other things to do? Is your life so empty, so completely devoid of any real, honest-to-God passion, that you honestly can’t think of a better way to spend these moments? Or are you so impressed with authority, so completely housebroken, that you give respect and credence to any sonofabitch who claims it? Do you read everything you’re supposed to read? Do you think everything you’re supposed to think? Do you buy what you’re told to want?
Get out of your apartment. Meet a member of the opposite sex. Stop the excessive shopping and masturbation. Quit your job. Start a fight. Prove you’re alive.
If you don’t claim your humanity, you will become a statistic.
You have been warned.
That’s not just a clever line from a movie. That’s the goddamn gospel. That’s the whole show.
To “start a fight” doesn’t mean you go out and get your teeth kicked in at a bar, though sometimes that’s a good place to start. It means you start a fight with your own quiet, comfortable, and completely soul-crushing desire to just lie down and die. It means you take a goddamn sledgehammer to the walls of the cage you’ve built for yourself.
You quit the job that’s eating your soul, even if you don’t have another one lined up. You walk away from the woman who is a beautiful, comfortable, and completely passionless lie. You start that stupid, beautiful, and completely impractical project you’ve been dreaming about for twenty years. You tell the truth, the whole ugly, beautiful, and completely necessary truth, even if it costs you everything.
That’s the fight.
And you will become a statistic. That’s the part that should scare you shitless. You’ll be a number on a spreadsheet in some insurance company’s office. A line item on a project report. “Male, age 74, died of a heart attack while watching television. No surviving family to speak of. Project complete.”
Is that the epitaph you want?
This is the point where a man has to make a choice. The real choice. Not between the red pill and the blue pill. The choice is between the pain of the fire and the pain of the rust.
The rust is the slow, quiet, and completely respectable rot of a life lived on its knees. It’s the dull ache of a soul that’s been in the ground for thirty years, even though the body is still walking around, paying its taxes and mowing the goddamn lawn.
The fire is the sharp, honest, and beautiful pain of a life that’s actually being lived. It’s the pain of growth, of failure, of heartbreak, of a real, honest-to-God fight. It’s the pain that reminds you that you’re still alive.
And if you’re going to choose the fire, then you have to go all the way.
“If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start.”
That’s not a cute, inspirational quote for your goddamn coffee mug. That’s a death sentence. That’s a promise of beautiful, ugly, and complete annihilation.
It could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives. And maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days, the hunger a clean, sharp, honest feeling in a world full of dull, phony satisfactions. It could mean freezing on a park bench, the cold a brutal reminder that you are alive. It could mean jail. It could mean the world looking at you and laughing, calling you a fool, a madman.
Isolation.
And that, right there, that isolation, that’s the gift.
All the other shit, the hunger, the cold, the laughter of the crowd, that’s just a test of your endurance. A test of how much you really want it. And you’ll do it, despite the rejection, despite the worst goddamn odds.
And it will be better than anything else you can imagine.
If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire.
You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.
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.
Look at the blueprints they handed you, and then look at the shithole you’re standing in.
And then ask yourself one last question.
Are you going to go all the way?
Or are you just another goddamn tourist in your own life, another beautiful and unique snowflake, melting in a river of piss and regret?
