I remember texting this to him sometime last year:
On your deathbed, you won’t wish you had worked more or made more money. You’ll wish you had taken me on vacation, fucked me on a beach.
Things to say to careerists you love(d).
Anyway.
I want to discuss death and discomfort, working to avoid living.
One could argue that to Live, we must be in some constant state of denial or avoidance of the subject of death; that it is impossible to acknowledge Death without it stopping us in our tracks. I would tend to agree, but I’d also argue that we do recognize death, albeit in small, manageable, everyday ways and seemingly only to attempt to control its timing or delay its inevitability (anti-aging products, working out, saving for a future that is not promised, etc.)
Indeed, we continuously push death out of our minds in order to force some sense onto our lives and the way we live them. We think we can control death, that it be delayed or, for some true sickos, successfully avoided. We are convinced that working ourselves to death is necessary, not just for survival but for The Future, a future that could very well never come, a future that could be cut short. Incredibly, even in this hell-climate, some people still cling to ideas like retirement, a peace only truly earned after decades of labor.
We tell ourselves that we will live Later. We tell ourselves that we will be happy Soon, Safe only after Saving, Someone only after Suffering.
Even the idea of a deathbed and its regrets is comforting and slightly delusional, and once again, not guaranteed. But my last thoughts, no matter where I am, will not be about work, status, or money.
They will be about Love.
They will be about things I said or didn’t say, wrote, or didn’t write. They will be about secrets I kept or didn’t keep.
I have written a lot about careerism.
If you’re a dedicated reader here, you know this already. I despise careerism, and time after time, it continues to be a subject I find myself coming back to. It is a fascinating and widely accepted psychosis. While it is a death cult, capitalism is not tolerant of grief or true reflection about death. Get up and over it, get back to work; don’t you dare stop and ponder your own mortality or that of those around you.
There’s no time for that.
So we put all our eggs in some promised basket and hope nothing goes wrong as we climb the shaky, evil ladder toward Success. We will see the fruits of our labor eventually. For now, status is enough. Rarely do we stop and think about time; after all, time is death, and death is time, and if you stop, you might never start again.
We give meaning to things without meaning and try to create fates worse than death - not having or doing Enough, being a Nobody, dying in obscurity.
And these fates seem more tragic than ever when we consider the landscape, the narcissism presiding over everything. What does a society full of workaholics, proud ones at that, really signal? A frantic attempt at a sense of control, a disarticulated humanity, a broken sense of purpose.
We think we need to earn the right to live, that the more we prove, the less death will be death.
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