Lately I’ve been thinking about death: it happens to all of us, it’s something normal, it will happen to me, I could even die tomorrow. Even if I don’t want it, I will die, like everyone else. I’m not exceptional just for being me. No matter how many gods I invent, no matter how many opportunistic preachers I pay because they promise to save me.
I’m just a monkey among 8 billion monkeys, I’m insignificant. Nothing wrong with that. It is what it is.
My life so far: take the path of least resistance. I have a job I don’t like much but I do it good enough so I don’t get fired, I enjoy cooking, fishing, poetry and drawing, hobbies that are cheap. I don’t need to keep up with the joneses.
There seems to be a perception that somebody like me is a loser, lazy, somebody who fails to live up to his potential, maybe I should try to do something exceptional with my finite time on earth, leave a legacy…
But that doesn’t appeal to me. After I die I won’t feel nothing, nor will I care about a legacy, so what’s the point?
Did realizing your time on earth is finite change how you see life?
Feel free to point out if this is me being depressed or if I need to snap out of my misanthropy, as somebody put it. I don’t consider myself depressed but after seeing and reading what humans do to other humans I don’t trust the better angels of our nature can make the world a better place.
Yes and no. I became very motivated for a few years to better myself in some areas of my life where I felt I sucked. Some of these improvements have stood the test of time, but most haven’t. In some ways you revert back to habits and old insecurities and anxieties after awhile. You start worrying about all the mundane, stupid shit again, like money and politics and what other people think about you, even though none of it matters.
But at the same time, at least in my experience, it also helped me appreciate life and feeling more connected with the world.
My realizations came first in the form of an existential panic attack where I realized that absolutely nothing that happens on planet Earth matters. None of it. Nothing matters. At all. Even the all encompassing concepts of life and death are entirely meaningless when you zoom out. It is trippy to realize, truly realize, just how meaningless we are. At the same time it is also freeing. At least it was for me when I came out of the panic attack. Felt like my brain had been rewired at bit.
Then a year later I had a dream which touched on the same topic, but from a more positive perspective. In my dream I was dying and I went around and thanked every person, good or bad, who had ever affected my life in any way. I was simply so grateful that they had given me experiences and made me feel the whole rainbow of emotions during my lifetime. Even the worst ones, I was so deeply grateful. When I died, I dissolved into atoms and became a billion tiny parts of the people i had known, loved or hated and i became a part of entire world and the universe, and it made me feel so peaceful and happy.
It’s two sides of the same coin. We are never more alone and lost in the world than when we are stuck in this one form and forced to live a life we never chose and barely understand, but at the same time, we are never truly alone at all, and we belong to each other and to the unknown in equal measures.
I don’t know what happened to my brain those two times, one year apart, but it fundamentally changed me and didn’t change me at all.
In general I appreciate life more than I used to exactly because it is all borrowed time, but I still have many, many days where all the stupid shit feels big and important, when it really isn’t.
Knowing that nothing truly matters, does not inspire depression and black thoughts in me personally. It frees me to make my own rules and live my life the way I think is the most positive. What impacts do I want to leave behind? Every day is a chance to leave a positive impact in some way. I can forgive myself for falling into the stupid worries in my day to day life as long as I remember to zoom out and appreciate how awesome it is that we are all here and what we can learn from one another.
I was recently reminded of life being fickle when I had to have my breast removed to save me from getting cancer. Made me make a few drastic changes to my life. Started spending more time with my siblings, made me finally cut off my parents and it made me promise myself to work less even if it means I will earn less. Can’t help the mundane worries. They slip in from time to time, but man, it’s nice to have these big wake up calls once in awhile. They are good reminders to spend your time on what matters to you. To me, it’s people and peace. I really don’t need much. Just a peaceful, boring life and the closeness of the people I love. That’s all.
thats pretty amazing mindset, and yes i totally agree with you especially i am getting older and i still not getting that peaceful boring life yet, life is just so cruel in many ways.
What’s in your way of getting a peaceful, boring life?
life itself is getting my way, i always encountered problems after problems, even this year i just lost 4 years of hardwork just because of small mistake. my money also stuck until next year and my mental health is not going better because of this.
Sounds really rough, but also relatable, friend! That thing with things just piling up year after year and you not catching a friggin break ever.
If I may play the world’s smallest violin for a sec: I had a period of 8 years - between 2015 and to 2023 - where my life finally went in the right direction for the first time ever in my life. Spent four years getting my degree and making genuinely good friends for the first time. After I graduated I teamed up with a former classmate and made a company and we had so many jobs and things were friggin awesome for another three years and then that stupid fucking war in Ukraine happened and inflation happened and no one would pay extra for our work so we went from having pretty okay incomes to struggling a tiny bit. And then 2023 happened and some changes occurred that meant I would have to work alone and work for two people by myself for a year. Didn’t get to have days off or hobbies or a social life for a year. Spent all my time and energy to keep this thing afloat alone and then when the year had passed all our clients dropped like flies because they couldn’t afford our services and had to cut their budgets, which was completely understandable. My partner came back and we limped along for awhile. Then we caught a major client who would secure us financially and the job was big so we had to say no to other smaller jobs in order to keep our autumn open. We barely got any income in the first half of 2025 because we had to prepare for the job and there was a ton of legal stuff we needed to learn about to not get screwed over. We were set to start working the first week of August or something like that and the weekend before, literally two days before we started, the company pulled out of the deal with no explanation. That killed our company because we had no jobs now. Lol. We managed, because we always do, to get a few smaller jobs to pay our company bills but we barely got any paychecks for ourselves.
Btw, I had suffered with stress since the end of 2023 and had gone from being an optimistic, social and creative person to being the opposite. When this final blow to our company happened I barely cared, tbh.
Also, meanwhile all this stuff with my company had been going on from autumn 2023 to now spring of 2026, my stupid mother also decided to destroy the family with narcissistic drama and got all of us involved in her bs so I had to basically take care of my elderly parents’ stupid divorce at some point and one of my best friends was cheated on so I had to be her support for most of 2024 while falling apart myself. In my company, we started the process of dissolving it in the beginning of this year. Meanwhile, my siblings started telling me they had cut contact with both our parents because it was revealed that they had systematically been manipulating and lying to us our whole lives, which didn’t surprise me, but what did, was the scope of the lies. Went from thinking my mother was just a bit of a narcissistic loser to genuinely wondering if she had tried to kill some pf us over the years by dripping poison in our ears to destroy our wills to live. Also, in one case, tampering with food to deliberately hurt one of my siblings who has an allergy. And then by June I was tested for breast cancer and I had the pre-stages to it and had my breast cut off entirely in July and in August, I officially “broke up” with my parents.
I dunno what the hell the future holds for me, and I don’t expect much at this point, but I always comfort myself with the knowledge that none of this shit really matters and I get to define and prioritize what matters. I have a garden that my spouse and I sow and plant all kinds of things in to help the insects. My cancer scare brought my siblings back together and we are going to hang out for the first time ever this weekend. Just the five of us. I have work still, and now that I’m back in the hamster wheel, I keep pace with the deadlines. All good stuff. I have days where I feel hopeless. I still don’t have my creative spark back and I’m still not social, but I have found a bit of optimism again and am accepting that things just take time.
I don’t know your situation, of course, but I recognize the feelings of having nonstop adversity. For three years I have had nothing but bad news. Literally, the only good thing that happened up until I got almost-cancer, was that my boyfriend and I moved out of our shitty apartment where we were surrounded by noisy and inconsiderate drunks and moved closer to the countryside and into a little house with a garden. That silly little garden has been the only bright spot in my life for months, right up until I had my breast removed and got my siblings back. Let me tell you how much this silly little garden could brighten my day in early spring when my life was a perpetual chaos and the first little spring flowers escaped the soil! Man, that was the entire reason to live! Listening to woodpeckers and owls and blackbirds singing to their mates. Wonderful. I think it’s the small things that can keep you from going mad, when you’re in the bad karma stretches of life. But yeah, I’m sure you know this. I just hope you have the option to find your little oasis of peace while you struggle your way through these hard times! End of my tiny violin.
What made it impossible to recover the lost work? I’m curious, because I’m sure you would have recovered it if you could have, so it must be pretty bad Dx sending you a digital hug. It’s not much, but I really feel for you! I cannot remotely imagine how absolutely devastated I would feel if I lost four years of work and had no way to get my money until next year 🫠 urgh. Do you have enough savings to get by until then? Sorry if I’m a bit too prodding. You don’t have to answer in case it’s too personal! 🤗🤗🤗