Do you know that feeling, when you're desperately trying to figure out your life? When you look at yourself and you have no idea who exactly you're looking at?
I feel like there's no way to tell who you are. Who can even pretend, they know who they are… I mean you can list your personal qualities, your occupation, your interests. But that doesn't mean anything, does it? What is the essence of a person? What does make you you? Your memories? The way you act in certain situations?
What does it say about me as a person, if it's two o'clock in the afternoon on a monday and I'm lying in my bed thinking about anything and everything at the same time, but actually doing nothing at all? Does it mean I'm lazy or self-involved or just not capable of doing stuff I'm supposed to do? And who even decides what we are supposed to do? We are capable of deciding ourselves, right? But then why are we so angry at ourselves, when we just do the thing we want to do in a certain moment and not do the thing we should do, just not to seem lazy, self-involved, irresponsible or undecisive?
I am sinking and grasping for air, for something to hold on to. I'm sucked in so deep in this self-inflicted depression of mine, that I can't see anything else at all. Every moment of every second of my life, I feel incapable of doing anything at all. I feel trapped and overwhelmed and wrong and stupid and unhappy with myself and everyone around me. I feel like I'm 14 and in my bedroom in my parents house. The only, but very important difference is, that I'm not 14. I'm fucking 23. I'm supposed to know what to do with my life. I'm supposed to work hard for my goals.
But what happens if you don't have goals? If you can't think of anything, anything at all. That's when you start to really lose it. Because that's what we're supposed to have. There's just no point in life, when you don't have goals. You drift around in a cloud of nothing – spheres of unimportant but fun distractions. You distract yourself from the one thing you should be figuring out – your future.
We proud ourselves to be living in the moment, in the present. We think that’s the explanation for our inability to fit in. It makes us special – creatures of freedom, art and love. The truth is, we are alone. Because in a world where the present doesn’t exist, and the only ones believing the illusion of its concept are lost children, nobody can survive that way. When everyone around you is building a career, looking for new job opportunities and studying abroad, there’s just no way for you to be like „ I don’t care, I live in the moment“. We’re not that emancipated, we should stop kidding ourselves.
So what’s left? The single, soul-crushing realisation that we are alone. Or are we? What if everyone really is that way, but some of us just force ourselves to do the important future shit? Who is right? The ones who voluntarily get swallowed by the machinery of the western civilization, the idea of career – this preposterous thought, that you are not worth anything if you’re not moving towards a better job, a higher position, more money – or the ones who want to escape, but never can and never will, because we're all social people who have been living in this world our whole life and we don’t know any better, than to feel ashamed and hate ourselves for not being able to work that much or have these goals or the energy you have to have to be successfull? Maybe the question shouldn’t be „Who is right?“, perhaps it should be „Who is happier?“, because that’s the really important thing: happiness.
So, who’s happier – the workaholic or the alcoholic? In the end we’re all addicted to something. And in most books, addiction never equals happiness.
The thing is, we are all loosers. We loose, that’s what be do. We loose friends, jobs, money, family members and partners. We loose energy, enthusiasm, our love for things that used to be really important to us, like painting, or playing the drums, or racket-ball. Ultimately we loose ourselves. This concept we never even succeeded in grasping.
