Death is comfortable. I didn't say dying is comfortable. I imagine that actually perishing is the epitome of un-comfortable. But death, being dead, yeah, that's the ultimate luxury. Not another care in the world to be had. No stress over money, or legacy, or whether you're balancing priorities in your life the right way, and what your kids are up to and what their future will be. That's all over and you can just relax. Comfortably.
Except of course that then it's over. The sum of your life's accomplishments are complete once you're dead. Setting aside for a minute the possibility of being rich and having your money work for humanity after you're gone, setting that aside, once you're dead what you personally can do for anyone else is finished.
I don't know about you, but the thought of never creating anything else for anyone makes me very un-comfortable. Pushing past 40 years old, knowing that half my life is probably gone already gives me a particular kind of anxiety, a sort of gnawing pain deep inside my chest. I'm grieving all the time that I've already wasted being comfortable. Too comfortable. Too dead.
Which brings me to my number one grievance today. Facebook is too fucking comfortable. And I fucking hate it, because it's fucking killing me.
Don't get me wrong, the book of faces is profoundly useful for keeping up with friends and family, and what parties I should be attending. No doubt about that. But nowadays every morning it seems like, I wake up in bed next to my beautiful wife and what do we do? Do we plan world domination? Or even what we have to look forward to today?
Do we fuck?
No.
Well, not most days, anyway.
What we fucking do is we fucking fire up our fucking iPhones and catch up on our fucking Facebook feeds. Sometimes for a good half hour to an hour. Cause it's comfortable. Having the time to see what inane bullshit our friends and celebrity causes are serving up instead of rushing off to work or whatever else needs to be accomplished is a fucking luxury.
Picture a poor Syrian couple fleeing the mayhem and destruction of the ISIS scourge. He and she and the kids, camping out as refugees in god-forsaken desert along with a hundred thousand of their best friends and family, all shitting and pissing and begging for mercy.
I bet our lovely couple would love to have the luxury of checking Facebook feeds in the morning when they wake up, but no, they have to drag themselves awake to face inevitable suffering and chaos. On a certain level I envy them, not because I want to be them, but because I suspect they're more alive than I am.
Our poor Syrian fuckers, they are present.
They're up to their necks in shit. Everything that they knew and held dear has gone to complete fucking hell, but despite it all they keep going because it's all they know how to do. To stay alive and to stay alive you have to be present.
I used to see all the crazy fucked up shit going on in the world, and all these poor people popping out babies they can't feed, fodder for catastrophe, and I'd get all pissed off and righteous and be like Jesus-fucking-christ, why don't those stupid cunts stops having sex??? Do they really have to rut and have babies in those conditions? Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with those idiots!
I'm the idiot and I hope the universe forgives me for being such a judgmental clueless jackass. Of course they're not going to stop fucking and popping out babies. Cause when you're in the present that's just what happens. You're not comfortable, but so what. The sun's going down, your eight kids finally passed out from heat exhaustion and hunger, your tent smells like shit and smoke, but hey now... there's a blanket and you look into the eyes of your haggard wreck of a wife and goddammit you love her more than you ever did before because she's your rock, and you give each other that come hither look and then she reaches down and grabs you in the way you like it, and there you go, a hit of the sweet sweet drug, the only one that can relieve their pain. And of course nine months later there's even more mouths crying out for a too-dry tit. And now we have even more death and more of everything that is terrible and beautiful and disgusting about humanity, but man!
...at least that shit is living, am I right?
What we do over here. Correction, what most of us do over here, where it's nice and we hire landscapers and maids and get that little ball of fat in our arm removed cause it's ugly, all that stuff that comes with the luxury of being born in the right place and time... all that shit that we do, all that time we consume being consumers, capitalist egotists. All that time.
Time.
For what exactly? Why do we get so much time, and do so little with it?
You and I have so much potential. For whatever fucked up chance and circumstance, I'm over here in my beautiful house, with my expensive computers, fretting about my diet stripped of refined sugar, cause I want to live a few extra years and be able to look in the mirror and have my ego be happy with what it sees.
And I'm comfortable.
And I'm dying.
Sure, kind of like everyone else is dying, except maybe worse. Because maybe you don't bear the same psychic burden, but let me tell you that somehow, the same fucked up chance and circumstance that got me here to where I am now? Not only am I failing to live up to my potential for greatness, but every fucking waking minute that I try to be present there is something that manages to remind me, to make me acutely aware of the fact that I'm failing to live up to my potential.
And face it, as much as I want to blame Mark Fucking Zuckerberg and the endless streaming carnival of human folly that is my Facebook feed, as much as you might want to say fuck those silicon valley fuckers and their disruptions! As much as you might want to shift the blame, nah man, you can't honestly do that.
Trying to pawn off that responsibility would be like a junky blaming his drug dealer cause the drugs are too good, too pure.
Being upset cause the drugs got us too high and now we don't want to do something else.
Cause we're too comfortable in this place.
In this bed. In this dirt.
Dying. Ultimately, dead and gone and forgotten.
So the questions remain: How do we change? How do we live more than we are living?
How do we shake out the comfort without destroying everything that gives our lives meaning? Without hurting the relationships that keep us going? The wife. The kids. The close friends. Seriously, despite it all, what about their comfort? Does it count for anything? Do I really want to impose my definition of what makes life worth living on them against their will? It would be fine if they figured it out themselves, but what if they don't?