To my young and unhappy friends, and also to some of my older friends who are unfortunately still unhappy: I want to tell you, please, please stay alive.
If you manage to live long enough, eventually you’ll realize that this world is basically made up of crazy people, fools, and hopeless obsessives like us. At that point, you probably won’t feel so ashamed of whatever abstract mental state you happen to be in.
Everyone is basically an old shitty car with every warning light on and somehow still running. So just keep driving that thing down the endless highway. However suspicious you are of the car, do not hit the brakes and pull over for an inspection. Life is kind of like this: the moment you seriously start dealing with your problems, you discover that there are infinitely more problems underneath them.
Honestly, to this day I still haven’t figured out the great benefit of knowing yourself deeply and thoroughly. Almost everyone I know who is particularly good at introspection has, more or less, spent some time stuck in the mud of depression.
The self is a rather despicable character. Maybe it was never meant to be examined this closely.
People who are obsessed with introspection are, in some sense, extremely narcissistic. We assume that the self must be this enormous, sacred labyrinth worth endlessly exploring. We appear unconsciously and disappear unconsciously. The universe keeps flying. Time and space move around. And this little person, just drifting somewhere inside all these laws of nature, insists on searching through the silence for the cause of her existence, its purpose, its evidence, its beginning.
It’s honestly a little stupid.
There’s that Frost poem about two roads diverging in a yellow wood, and taking the one less traveled. I’ve always found it funny. When you’re young, who wants to walk down the crowded road? Everyone wants the road less traveled. Which is already a paradox. The moment you define it as the road less traveled, its meaning starts to disappear. Once everyone wants the little road because it’s the little road, well, now it’s the highway.
But after you get past that young and restless stage, the line starts to mean something again.
For a while, young people stand around at the intersection together. Then, quietly, they begin to split off. After that, some of their lives never cross again.
From what I’ve seen, there are roughly three kinds of people walking these roads. The first kind can walk onto the little road without much effort at all. In my sophomore year of college, I went to Nepal alone and met a woman there. She seemed to have been born into some kind of romantic weightlessness. To her, life was just this huge wilderness she could wander through however she wanted.
Then there are people who genuinely like the wide, straight, safe road, and walk down it without ever looking back. They are the most respectable winners of our time.
And then there’s the third kind. I’m one of those, anyway. Somehow, voluntarily or not, we get swept onto the big wide road, but we keep walking while looking back over our shoulders, always feeling like something is slightly wrong.
And which kind loves introspection the most? Definitely the third. Every step requires another iteration. Every iteration loses a little bit of who you were. Every little loss of self brings another painful round of self-examination. And then you do it again. And again. Not tirelessly. Painfully.
I don’t know what the ultimate solution to this enormous system is. It’s a shame you can’t brute-force your way through life until you find happiness.
But I do know one thing: you have to stay alive. I’ve never thought death was particularly heavy. If anything, death seems almost too easy, too weightless. Living doesn’t have that much meaning to begin with. Why would dying suddenly give it some?
So, my young friends, go ahead. Get your hearts broken while you still can. By the time you get older, you might not have much of a heart left to break. And even if you do, once it breaks, good luck putting the damn thing back together.