The True Cost of Living
I thought I’d start today’s post off by skipping to point #6 that I had about how to “Unfuck Your Life,” and that point is: “Accept That You’re Going to Die, Allocate Your Time Wisely.” This is the true cost of living.
Last week was my birthday, and we celebrated by disconnecting from society and going to see Ashley Flowers “The Deck” in Austin (I’m a huge CrimeJunkie nerd). It didn’t matter that it was absolute bone-chilling cold out, Megan and I wanted to camp. Besides, nobody likes to camp when it’s cold so we got plenty of peace and quiet, minus the cow that I was 90% was getting murdered at two in the morning.
We woke up to a freakishly foggy morning, which made everything wet the next two days. The next two days we spent huddled by a fire, snuggled in our blankets on the roof of my truck, devouring dutch oven lasagna, and drinking espresso martinis. These are the days I love the most, where the days actually feel longer because you’re experiencing boredom from the lack of outside stimuli which forces you to live in the present moment… something I find incredibly hard to do at times. This is how I stretch the cost of my living out.
Every morning, as I go to the bathroom, I doom scroll through the internet. I used to be addicted to my social media apps, but these days I become less and less drawn to them. They stress me out with the constant barrage of pointless information, faux-intimacy, fake connection, and the facades people put up to make it look like their lives are together. It’s a FoMO petri-dish and just as shallow.
The internet used to be a tool that drove connection. Gone were the days where you’d never know what your old colleague or high school friends were up to. Gone were the days where you’d lose touch with people since they didn’t have a cell phone or an email. Now we have it at our finger tips… and we just piss away that capability by ego-feeding or faking intimacy. I used to have someone send me 20 videos a day of the dumbest bullshit ever… and quite frankly it stressed me out just trying to sift through the shit. Each video was 1-3 minutes long… and that’s nearly AN HOUR of my time I’ll never get back because I spent it on memes. I’d much rather spend that time with the people I love, helping others, or in the peace of the wilderness.
I fear getting old… really I do. Turning 35 last week, I’ve been feeling a heavy existential dread in my chest for days now. It’s a smothering feeling that brings me into bouts of depression. I can feel a noticeable difference in my athletic performance and ability to recover. My ankle is still trashed even after surgery. The cold really gets to me now. I can’t eat half the things I used to enjoy without destroying my insides. I notice the gray hairs blooming on my parents and my friends babies now become teenagers. I wrote out my will the other day and I realized that my generational wealth will go to no one, because I have no children or decedents. But I’ve been working on how to reframe that thought into a positive experience. I’ve seen a lot of dead people in my life. It comes with the territory of what I do for a living… but with death constantly being in my face I’ve learned to appreciate the little time I do have even if it stresses me out a little bit to think of it. All of this makes me crave peace in my life.
During my camping trip, I burned some of my old journal entries as I felt that they were written by a past person who no longer existed. These entries don’t serve me much now, but occasionally I’ll get a little nugget of wisdom from my old self that the present me needs reminding of.
I re-read one of my journal entries from 2021. I wrote it when I was on a plane trip to Houston, going house hunting. I wrote “despite the times I feel so low that I want to die, I must remember that life is a gift. Me just being born is a gift because it provides an opportunity to live that many others don’t get. So long as there’s life, there is opportunity… so long as there is opportunity, there is a purpose to continue living. I must remember that when times get dark or I feel afraid.”
Statistically speaking, you shouldn’t exist. Your mom had over 100,000 eggs and somehow she dropped YOU into her uterus that month. Your dad threw out anywhere between 70-150 million little swimmers that day… and somehow YOU found the egg. That thought alone is pretty mind numbing, but then you start to think about how that relates to your grandparents, and their parents, and their parents parents, and the fact that the dinosaurs got blown up by a comet and all sorts of other cataclysmic events and the fact that you exist is pretty spectacular.
This guy named Dr. Binazir actually sat down and calculated it and it’s something insane like 1 in 10 to the 2,685,000 power. You can look at the infographic here:
I know some may attribute this to a miracle. Maybe it’s not a miracle, per say, because the definition of a miracle is something that defies natural law (or at least that’s what my college philosophy teacher beat into our heads), but you’re definitely pretty rare. Some may even attribute this to divine intervention, but then I think about all the folks who didn’t make it due to miscarriage, abortion, infertility, etc. and I really just don’t like to mix things like “fate” and “destiny” into this… I don’t know, for me it cheapens it a bit… takes away the grandeur of the staggering statistics that were in between you and existence. I really want you to read this, try to digest this number, and really grasp that you being alive or growing old is something to treasure. Then I want you to take that deep appreciation for this gift, then think about those around you who live their life in suffering and think about what little thing you can do to make this world one that we can all enjoy. One little… TINY thing… like feeding the homeless, or standing up for someone, or complimenting someone, or just not being an abusive turd, or showing kindness to a stranger.
So we’ve established two things: one, that you are rare and two, that one day you will DIE… so why waste this gift on silly shit like arguing over the internet or making TikTok videos? Why make other people’s lives miserable?
You’ve got a bank account filled with finite cash. You don’t know how much money is in that bank account, but you swipe your card anyways until it gets declined. Don’t you think you should be more considerate on what you swipe your card on? I ain’t gonna tell you how to spend it, but I’m going to suggest how you can get the most bang for your buck.
I’m still terrified of dying, and the thought of not existing still sends a shiver down my spine, but I refuse to let that rule my life… rather I choose to use it as a tool to budget my time accordingly.
