2013-05-18

Night-time confessions

Pursuit of freedom/rat race: possible future house and apartment-hunting snack

I am sick and tired of this 21st century bullshit. Trainspotting was cool, but it's over. Choosing is over. There is no such thing as a choice in a world that is constructed of choices. Life is not about a decision between a three-piece suit and a decadent t-shirt. If you truly think that, you have missed the point.

No-one is special. You are not special. The thoughts that occur to you have been thought out and over many times before you even had time to stop and blink, let alone think. The feelings you are feeling have been felt every possible way around - it is a hopeful thought when it comes to feelings like loneliness or desperation, but it makes love, affection and glory seem trivial.

The rat race is the same whether you are trying to achieve money and status or a freedom you perceive as the ultimate and only one. You are not free as long as you seek something that only serves yourself, nor will you attain freedom by judging others' perceptions of freedom. Taking the path of a quaint middle-class life is as much of an independent thought, as valuable an equivalent to freedom as the act of deciding to leave everything behind to go on an infinite road trip. Recognize your rat race, whether it is fueled by money or the pursuit of a perfect body, new Nike trainers or the lack of a day job and a surf house on the beach.

You are not free as long as you are hung up on the feeling of being special, unique, the first and only one to feel love, desperation, fear, passion, wanderlust. I am not sorry to inform you that probably nothing you will achieve is going to make a difference. All the tumblr quotes and pictures you share, post, collect, admire, hate, lust over, do not mean a thing. Make yourself count by other ways than the vapid ways the world is encouraging you to. Picasso was not a great artist because he painted pictures of his own facial features. Dostoyevsky was not a great composer because he composed pieces about himself. Make things count. Make your thoughts count by doing something to fulfill other passions and needs than those that are directly your own. Humans were born with the sense of altruism, it is not a reinforced myth.

And if you do something, do it by the highest standards possible. If you want rough, do not settle for bruises. If you want suffering, do not take the road of artificial, photogenic suffering, but immerse yourself in it. There is nothing I hate more than photogenic lives of constructed misery. See, feel, fear something that makes you at least aspire to something different and maybe then you will catch a glimmer of truth.

At the end of your Sunday dinner, what do you find fulfilling? At the end of your life, what will you applaud yourself for; what will you avert your eyes from?

On the Road has already been written.

And Bukowski has already been dead for 9 years.

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