The cycle

Either way

What you do with your life doesn’t matter. What you don’t do doesn’t matter. Nothing really matters. Whatever the outcome you will die at some point regardless. People around us make it feel as though things matter. We care about our lives and care about the things we do and have compassion for others. Things mentioned at the start of this text drive us to care. We are all co-considerationally selfish, we are ridden with curiosity and placated with a reward system. Enlightened, educated, informed or sophisticated, call it aware, we may or may not be. We have our time. We play our game, and it only seems to make a difference but ultimately it does not.

So, tell me this. If I can confidently say that nothing matters, why does it seem that things do indeed matter? Put the book down and write down the answer. Or take a sip, be spoon fed once again. It matters because you have time left. You have further to go. You are still alive. What happens next, what has happened lately and what might happen soon, matters. The more you learn the more you can apply it. The more quality friends you have the more chance of spending quality time together. The better your reputation, the better you are received. Any slander fired in your direction matters as that can dictate what you can and can’t do. Your good name matters until you get too decrepit to care. Your finances matter as that dictates the comfort and options available to you going forward into the future. All aspects of your life matter if they are to be of help to you in the coming years. The amount of reward set to be released in your head is dependant on your situation now and prospective situation in the future. Your legacy will fade to next to nothing. However, you want to revel in the pride in your achievements before you go. Or feel that warm glow periodically as you daydream about your family thinking fondly of you. That daydreaming takes place before you die. Evidently it stops afterwards.

You can shrug of what happened yesterday, ignore it or put it down to experience. It doesn’t matter. However, what happened yesterday, what happened an hour ago, can affect what is set to happen in the days, months, years to come.

We care about what people think and rightly so. We care about what we have achieved and rightly so. We might not make any notable changes to the planet, but what we are makes a huge difference to the how things will be in the years we have left. Our personal progress counts for what we can do next before we die. After that it is matters not one bit. Not to us anyway. To others maybe. It feels good to think about what will be of us when we are gone. We feel it matters as we feel it physically now. On a universe level our lives are tokenistic. They represent something. Our lives have a value. An imaginary value no different to other imaginary concepts, money, love, time.

You could write a drama screenplay about our family said she with that intense self-facing gawp. The twists, the turns the thought-provoking nuances are all there. However, not most families, but all families will be packed full of drama. There will be many a sexual assault witnessed or hidden. At least one of the family members will be subject to a rape or pressured into sex. A fool assumes that applies only to the female members of your family unit. There will be jealously, rage, and affairs. There will be betrayal and scheming. Bulling and trauma aplenty. Childhood damage. Childhood scarring. Children planned and unplanned. Cukolding. Bizarre coincidences are rightly normal and expected. Misery and moments of utter joy. Your family is nothing special. Nothing out of the ordinary. And your part matters to you the most. All families will have some excitement, somewhere at some point.

If you think you excel at existence by steering away from the linear life, look around and take off your prejudicial scorn suit. Whilst a typical linear life entails schooling, the first love, the first thrust of intimacy, the first infatuation, the first fling. That is followed by the first step in your ‘career’. Then marriage or marriage of sorts. Then a child or not. Then some more hard work. Then doubts and redirection, then retirement, then death. That path. That one way of copying the rest can be sidestepped. Maybe you are a grifter, a joker, an opportunist that lives in a paper-thin walled mobile home in a shit corner of the globe. You have neither escaped nor deviated from the linear life. Not really. You are a pretender and an inverted snob. Disagree at your leisure but accept that you are just another skeleton with skin wrapped around it trying to be relevant.