You wake up from a stuporous sleep feeling ambitionless and bloated. Your prerogative to start your day by ingesting boiling liquids grants you the gift of bowel movement and after a cleansing shower you’re stricken with a sinking need of purpose. 

Ah yes, purpose. That inherent word that has needed no dictionary, no basic literacy, for you to understand it - and need it greatly - since your days of diapers. 

Your mind seeks for the more feasible routes by which to appease this feeling: start reading the paper more often, renovate your wardrobe, be a better professional; basically, be a better you. 

And there you meet your first bump on the road. ‘How can I be a better me if I so hate myself, and others, oh so very much?’ you ask. And then you realize you don’t have to hate everyone, you just do because you feel they’re intellectually inferior, or at the very least not active in the art looking under the rug of every concept to find the years of filth concealed, and that’s just damnably unacceptable. 

But how does the world even go round without asking what your input is? How do the members of society thrive and decorate their homes with jolly Christmas cheer and lights when you’ve not told them it’s ok to do so? What even IS the economy? And there lies the answer; the world, nay, the people, don’t need you to survive. Nobody needs you. Perhaps your mom does and that’s only due to some guilt-induced biologically-imprinted feeling of protective love that tells her it’s better if you’re happy with your life. But the world doesn’t need your snarky remarks to screw a Smart 42” LCD screen to their bedroom wall. 

Even if those snarky remarks contained the very essence of truth, the very components of life that other great thinkers with no Wikipedia at their hands couldn’t come up with in their time, they are not, in any way, vital. And you will see that every day; your handy workmate who’s also a great plumber at home and a fervent christian on his off days doesn’t need to hear your unwritten dissertation on the insignificance of human life in a universe so vast to continue being accepted by others. At best your 5-point bit on why attempting conversation at a club is in all ways senseless will make it a solid 2-points before you’re interrupted at the next party you attend. 

So now that you’re dressed and ready and late for whatever work covers your card’s minimal monthly payment you stop and realize you have become a human comment section where no comment is needed. And the worst part of it all is that this drastically affects your daily mood, that limited energy with which you affront your daily encumbrances, and that just sucks ‘cause that’s where money comes from.

And while you may be feeling that I’ve touched on different subjects and it seems I can’t arrive to a conclusion or an argument that at least binds them together, my conclusion is this: put an end to that cynical you, store it in a vault for when times decide it’s hip to choose a standpoint of disbelief and suspicion toward every concept with a pulse out there, one that renders you motionless and unproductive while making you feel like you’ve achieved something because you reached an opinion on how stupid that person’s definition of love is. 

Maybe the reason you judge your friend the chef’s career choice is because deep down you know you won’t be able to afford eating at their restaurant often enough to tell if they’re good enough. Don’t get mad that everyone’s favorite ill-used adjective is ‘epic’; be glad that they still consider stuff to be epic and aren’t depressed enough to go poor and ask you for some money down the road.

Switch your paranoia settings to off; the world is not some big conspiracy of lies waiting to be unveiled, and if it were it most surely wouldn’t be you who unveiled it.

I’m not saying you should change your nature, or your pursuit of an intellectual plateau that lets you better see the world while sipping on a cocktail of accomplishment, I ‘m saying it’d be good, for a change, to adjust our thought patterns to not care so much about noticing how wrong the people who surround us actually are.

There is no hidden philosophy to all this, no judgmental conclusion from an advantageous point of view, no need, though you’re totally entitled to, to call this epic. Just be a little less of a dick toward others in your head I guess. I don’t know. Maybe you should just stick to that wardrobe renovation idea you had in the first place.

I’d swim the ocean for you babe. I’d probably start regretting it by the time sea salt starts covering my lung walls and I realize you’re probably taking a nap as I dog paddle. These promises are never smart decisions. 

Be productive, they said. Here’s the internet, they also said.

Everything is gonna be OK if your definition of OK changes drastically and periodically.

I vaulted from my bed last night, coughing as a result of choking on my own saliva at 11:36 pm. At first I thought it had to do with my posture, (I take on many forms of the fetal position every night) but as I instinctively tried to gasp for air, the way was shut. A Gandalf of saliva lodged in my airway impeded the air to go further, causing it to explode into a different, new, coughing fit. By then I really needed to breathe again, but as I tried to inhale, the way was shut again. I ran outside, stepping on the cold grass in my backyard, a half-moon and the neighbors awake enough to hear my interrupted gasping the only witnesses to the event. The air was everywhere around me, just not exactly where I needed it. Seconds weren’t seconds, but a countdown. I saw no solution and did not possess the medical knowledge to accurately punch my way out of it. I took another step and then a small way cleared, one of my nostrils managed to get half a liter of precious chilled invisibility into my lungs and I was alive again. Tears dripped from both sides of my chin, mind you these were gagging tears; there was no sadness in the incident, no montage of memories, just surprise, complete apprehension; my entire existence suffocating to nothingness over a blocked airway half an inch in diameter and I was not afraid, but surprised at our frailty. I went to bed reminiscent of the instants, the confident reflex of relying on our homely atmosphere for survival and feeling it try to do its job while a very important part of me went on break. No epiphanies, no moral to the story, just, fuck, you know.

Besides talent, people demand humility from their heroes so they can bring them down to earth for a moment and feel less shitty about their own talentless limbs.