Living Is The Hardest Thing You’ll Ever Do — An Anti-Motivational Speech
On the absurdity of life.
--
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
— Albert Camus.
I used to have this little fantasy.
I’d go to a bookstore and order an espresso. I’d browse around the displays and imagine my book up at the front, plastered in blurbs.
It’s been a good ten years since I used to do that. These days, I’m lucky if I can even find a bookstore. Most of them are closed. My town has one left, and I can’t exactly hang out there right now.
Some dreams have to evolve.
Others have to die.
It’s okay.
We fight like hell for the basics.
Yesterday I read another article about happiness. This one said most people don’t want to be rich and famous. We can all be just as happy as billionaires as long as we can attain the basic necessities.
Food. Clothing. Shelter.
Well, yeah.
You know that. I know that. Everyone knows that. So you have to wonder why we have to fight like hell for these basics. You have to wonder why we make shelter so godawful expensive.
Here’s my answer:
It’s the rich assholes. They know money doesn’t make you happier, but they still want it. They know a lot of us don’t care that much about money, so they came up with a clever little trick.
They withheld the basics.
Now we have to work for them, all the time, our entire lives, so they can have things they know they don’t need.
It’s quite a racket.
Dreams are hard to give up.
It’s easy to give up what you never wanted, like sports cars and yachts. Most of us don’t care about luxury. We never yearned for empty status symbols. We don’t daydream about fancy homes anymore.
We dream about the little things.
We imagine some place in time where we’ll know we’ve made it, when we realize we can finally relax and enjoy life.
