Just Give Up

Do you feel horrible? Is your body racked with pain? Do you experience unending ennui?

If so, congratulations! Do you know how hard people work to be happy? It's an excruciatingly difficult process and requires constant vigilance. Feeling like crap is easy! You don't have to do a damn thing! Feeling shitty is the default condition of humanity. I don't know why, I don't ask why. I just accept it as it is and embrace it.

Life for me is so simple. I constantly feel miserable and for this I am grateful. When I wake up I remember all the good times I've had in life and realize that I have very few good days left. It's a relief. I spend my mornings huddled under blankets trying to shut out the day, waiting for night to fall so I can sleep again. I love it. I don't even have to get out of bed to experience dread! Why would I not embrace that?

You see, it's just a matter of bucking the trends and adopting a new attitude. There's so much pressure to be happy and it changes the way people live their lives. Suddenly, they're preparing for triathlons, trying to get Super Bowl tickets, preparing the perfect romantic getaway, pursuing higher education to one day land their dream job, and making bucket lists. Fuck that. That's a lot of work. Besides, doing those things rarely results in real or lasting happiness. The ratio of work-to-happiness is like 100 to 1. Really, really bad odds.

Meanwhile, my odds of being dissatisfied with a TV dinner and an evening of toenail clipping is almost 100 percent. I experience feeling like a squished dog turd without even trying. Even my lack of making attempts to be happy leaves me feeling unworthy. By embracing the attitude that life isn't worth the effort I have freed myself to be despondent, a feeling that arises with no effort at all. In fact, putting forth effort almost guarantees that I won't feel despair. Why the hell would I want that?!

I know there are few bookstores any more, but when there were in the 1990s and early 2000s the biggest aisles with the heaviest shopping traffic were for self-help. Literally every self-help book was about improving life in some way, most specifically to make one happier and feel more fulfilled. If you think it's hard to feel happy then don't even bother trying to become fulfilled. Fulfillment? Dear Lord, that's slightly more attainable than finding the Fountain of Youth. You might feel fulfilled some time in your life, but it will almost surely be accidental and it will last less than a day.

Guess what? The day after feeling fulfilled even happiness feels like a major disappointment. And now you're going to spend thousands of dollars to rebuild a classic car for six months in the hopes that you'll enjoy yourself? Now you're wasting time and money and you're going to be pissed more often than happy because you're always going to be missing a crucial part. Pretty soon you and your wife drift apart, your son never wants to join in with you for good old fashioned father-son bonding because he's playing video games, and your hours are cut at work because China's building more widgets than you can sell.

You fucked up. You could have spent no money moping at home and work while being completely indifferent to whether you'd done something instead of nothing. Dying will be easier that way. You'll have no regrets because you'd never expected anything from life but hardship and heartache. Your unhappiness would no know bounds. You're only fear of death will be that you might wind up in an afterlife that is happy and fulfilling. If you have to have a hope, if you can't do without one, then hope there is a Hell and hope you're going there to spend eternity in agony and shame. Think about how easy it is to get into hell according to most religions and how fucking hard it is to get into heaven or nirvana!

Dude, choose the sure thing. Don't gamble with your life only to wind up disappointed that all of your hard work, sacrifice, care for the sick and poor, and abundance of loving kindness leads to an eternity of damnation. You'll be swimming next to Pol Pot in a lava pit having your entrails eaten by fish demons for eternity and he'll be asking you what you did to deserve such a horrific fate. He'll be like, "I was responsible for the genocide of hundreds of thousands of people ... and you fed starving babies while caring for your sick and dying great aunt Edna? Ha hahahahaha!" Yeah, Pol Pot is going to laugh at you for being such a stupid douche bag for believing in goodness and happiness and fulfillment. He'll point over to a wall where Buddha, Gandhi, and Mother Theresa are being beaten with the limbs of Red Cross volunteers and say, "See? Doesn't matter whether you're good or bad, happy or sad. It all ends with eternal punishment so you might as well get your rocks off doing whatever you want no matter how much society frowns on your behavior. You're spending, what, 80 years on earth being good and trying to be happy versus endlessness in Hell being tortured for no reason at all? Come on, man, just admit that you wasted the only worthwhile years of your eternal life believing that up was down."

Pol Pot knows his shit. I know mine. You have to change. I'm introducing a new line of self-help guidance. For those who have already perfected the attitude and lifestyle of sloth and dismay, they'll never read this because they'd never put forth the effort to read. But you obviously still care about your life because you're reading this. That's a mistake. It'll take time for you to wean yourself off of effort and goals of happiness and fulfillment. You can do it, though. Try to put aside an hour each day to let yourself feel the existential horror of being; spend a morning each weekend lying in bed thinking about your most embarrassing moments, the most crushing losses you've experienced, and the dreams you once had that you know are no longer attainable. It's a start at least. I don't expect you or anyone who has cared about living a good life to master a cheerless life with a bleak future in a matter of months.  If you don't stop trying to be happy, though, your life will never be as gloomy as it could be.

The choice is yours; just give up.