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Plotting my escape from encroaching mediocrity once again. I have this stupid idea that I've got to make something of myself and reach total perfection of character by age twenty-two, and it's kind of bled into everything I do. Rimbaud wrote his entire catalogue before the age of twenty, and Newton discovered calculus at twenty-two. I'm not saying I'm the next Newton or anything, but I am worried about what I'll have to show for all my years. I'm afraid I'll be grown one day and still know nothing. I can't really enjoy video games anymore because I keep thinking 'damn! I should be studying physics or reading Aristotle or lifting weights.. something.' Oftentimes I feel like I'm on top of the world - like every possibility is open to me and I'll squander it all if I'm idle for even a second.
I remember being nine years old and not being able to imagine living past eighteen because I just had no idea what I'd be doing when I was grown. I've wanted to hold down a job since I was eleven, because back then I felt this need to make myself useful and prove myself somehow and I conceptualized that as having a job. I would've jumped at the chance to haul metal pipes around in a factory or something. Now I've been eligible to work for over a year with nothing to show for it, so I guess my eleven year-old self would be disappointed in me.
Sometime in the last few years I got this idea that growing older was a form of dying - not in the literal sense. I'd look at pictures of myself from years past and realize I didn't really register that person as myself, because in a sense it isn't. I'm pretty healthy, so if nothing happens to me I'll probably end up living into my eighties, but the fella typing up this post will be gone long before then. My current aspirations, my fears, my antipathies - they're not going to stay with me forever. I know there's no way to prevent it, no way to stay a fixed ideal - you either grow or stagnate, and since there's always something to be done we only really stagnate when we're dead or close to it. Resigning to indifference is a kind of rot.
Setting the bar at twenty-two feels like I'm drawing a hard limit for my life. The hell am I going to be doing after? Run off to a farm in Bordeaux or something? Maybe I'll be turning lathes in a precision parts factory or in the army, something along those lines. It doesn't matter anyway, and now I've just wasted more time on useless sentiments that've no doubt been echoed by hundreds of millions before me. I feel silly writing this now - should be studying physics instead.
I remember being nine years old and not being able to imagine living past eighteen because I just had no idea what I'd be doing when I was grown. I've wanted to hold down a job since I was eleven, because back then I felt this need to make myself useful and prove myself somehow and I conceptualized that as having a job. I would've jumped at the chance to haul metal pipes around in a factory or something. Now I've been eligible to work for over a year with nothing to show for it, so I guess my eleven year-old self would be disappointed in me.
Sometime in the last few years I got this idea that growing older was a form of dying - not in the literal sense. I'd look at pictures of myself from years past and realize I didn't really register that person as myself, because in a sense it isn't. I'm pretty healthy, so if nothing happens to me I'll probably end up living into my eighties, but the fella typing up this post will be gone long before then. My current aspirations, my fears, my antipathies - they're not going to stay with me forever. I know there's no way to prevent it, no way to stay a fixed ideal - you either grow or stagnate, and since there's always something to be done we only really stagnate when we're dead or close to it. Resigning to indifference is a kind of rot.
Setting the bar at twenty-two feels like I'm drawing a hard limit for my life. The hell am I going to be doing after? Run off to a farm in Bordeaux or something? Maybe I'll be turning lathes in a precision parts factory or in the army, something along those lines. It doesn't matter anyway, and now I've just wasted more time on useless sentiments that've no doubt been echoed by hundreds of millions before me. I feel silly writing this now - should be studying physics instead.
