I regret to inform you that you’re dying.

We all are.

The journey we’re on is a one way trip and we’re unlikely to discover a cure by the time you need it.

Knowing that, how will you decide to live the life you have?

For most of my life, I wasn’t thinking about this question much. I’ve spent a long time just going through the motions. Living my life through the path of least resistance.

The world is ending and we’re all going to die but the question is: what are we going to do in the meantime and why?

Sometime in 2021, I decided that, above all else, I want to avoid a slow death. I don’t want to live an unexamined life where I constantly obliterate my consciousness through video games and just do what I’ve always done.

Change is difficult, perhaps more difficult for me than most. But, change is something I strive for now more than ever before. I don’t want to be the same person I was yesterday. Every day I’m alive is an opportunity for growth and for new experiences.

New experiences are harder to come by these days but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try.

The elevator in the building I live in broke down recently. There’s quite a few older people with reduced mobility living here, so I wrote a letter and posted it up offering to help anyone to get their groceries to their unit. Imagine being in your 70s with a cane trying to get your groceries to the 7th floor without an elevator, it’s not happening.

Past me might have not even understood that was something that I should do (I’ve spent a long time being pretty clueless).

Thankfully, today’s me was able to realize that I’m physically capable and I like helping people so I might as offer to help people move some heavy stuff around.

In doing so, I was able to meet an older gentleman in my building who is absolutely amazing. A big nerd like me who’s led a life that I can only dream of.

If I hadn’t offered to help out with this broken elevator situation, I wouldn’t have ever met him and that would be very sad.

Avoiding a slow death is a challenge because it seems that the world we live in today has been shaped to encourage us to live “slow deaths” in our little cramped cubes with despair, pain and fear being injected straight into our brains through the little black boxes we carry around with us everywhere.

But, even if it’s hard, even it requires everything from me, I need to fight the slow death. I need to fight the urges programmed into my brain without my consent by a system built by the people in power who don’t give a fuck about me (I’m glad the Queen is dead btw, fuck her and all she stands for).

It would be easier to give up. To decide that I am powerless in the face of a series of overwhelming obstacles whether present in my psyche or the world outside of my own head.

Even if there’s no hope, the moment you let hope die is the moment you die.

I don’t want to die. Not now, not ever, but it’s going to happen eventually. The timer is ticking, how will you choose to live your life and why?

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