I’ve been obsessed with death, legacy, success lately. Trying to define those things for myself. And after almost thirty years of existence, all I can say is that it scares the hell out of me on a daily basis.
About two years ago, I officially became an atheist. I grew up a Presbyterian, to the point where I actually regularly attended Bible studies twice a week and church every Sunday through high school and college (ironically, this has never stopped me from having the worst sailor’s mouth you’ll ever hear). And as I grew older, I became preoccupied with the idea of evidence, facts, proof. A lot of people will tell you that faith is something undefinable by worldly things, by plain evidence, by tangible things. That’s fine if you can accept, and even further, rejoice in that. I cannot. And so, I relegated my spiritual beliefs to believing in some kind of random order to the universe that embodied in some form, a deity that created the universe. After three years of law school, pulling apart my mind and trying to mold how I came to understand complex theories and concepts, I took an occam’s razor view of everything, mostly to survive amidst the 12 hour study sessions; your mind could only hold so much at once. And in a weird moment of clarity, I saw that order as reality, and took a year reading books and writings to make sure that I was ready to make that jump from toes-in-the-water agnostic to full-blown atheist. And so I did.
Up to that point, I never really knew what death, or permanence meant. They were esoteric ideas in my head, where eternity and oblivion were somewhat easy to grasp in the shadow of an omniscient God. Without the man upstairs, suddenly I had to face the fact that death was real, and that there was no afterlife. That eternity was a sham. Nothing lasts forever. And for the first time in my life, death, dying, endings, scared me. It shook me to my core for a while more than most people probably could understand.
I’ve never been scared of growing older. I realize this is pretty easy for me, a relatively healthy man without any history of balding on either side of my family. I’m perfectly comfortable getting older. If you ask me, I’ve felt like an older man for a really long time, not in the sense that I’m sophisticated or refined, but more that I’m just a dude who has never really been someone to act a fool, to drink and party, to ostensibly act like a young person. I’d much rather sit at home and watch old movies and drink tea than be out dancing to Kid Cudi while drinking jager bombs (though, just to make clear, I am not adverse to that either). And at a certain age, I just remember everyone around me freaking out about getting old. Not just the stereotypical female reaction that sitcoms and Cathy comics portray, and not in the “mid-life crisis” like reactions of dudes eclipsing thirty, trying to act like youngsters. There was this real palpable fear, because to be honest, none of us knew what the hell we were supposed to do with our life.
This is the same problem with any generation. We reach a certain point where we’ve been out of school for long enough to reach some form of stability, whether it’s professionally (and by proxy, financially), or personally (i.e. married, etc.), and we wake up one day and realize we’ve been in the same place for the longest period of our lives. Nothing has changed, nothing has shifted, nothing is new. Isn’t that what’s scary, when you really examine the concept of “getting old”? That nothing will be new? New things are exciting, they’re thrilling, they’re scary and wonderful. And when you sit in one place, with the same people, doing the same thing for so long, the new things you try to fill the spaces in your life with can’t overshadow the fact that your life, as a whole, has not changed in a very long time. And those years, spent doing the same thing over and over, could have been used to do something at the very least, more interesting than the same repetitive cycle. Only, none of us have any clue how to change our lives after building up these walls of security, doing the things that we’re supposed to do to have a stable life. And so we sit, dissatisfied. And it just festers.
My whole life has been spent trying to build some sort of legacy. I spent years of my life creating art, stacks of notebooks full of writings, hundreds of songs made during college, even now I find myself spreading myself thin across multiple platforms. And the whole time, the resounding sentiment is, “there’s just not enough time.” I’m obsessed with doing the mental math on how long a person worked a day job until they succeeded with their creative work; they were born this year, they must have graduated college here, worked this many years until they succeeded and could do this full time. I hold the stencil up to my own life and do the math, add three years for law school, an extra year for time off, working for three years…is it too late? Have I passed the point of that potential success? Is it time to pack it in?
In a very backwards way, my loss of infinity in life led me to understand the concept of permanence. Permanence now had an end-date (i.e. my death), it was containable, understandable, believable. And I realized for the first time, what it meant to commit to another person in my life. I understood what the future could be, separate from the things I wanted it to be. And even though for the first time ever, I viewed my life as having a half-life, I realized that I had more time than I thought, while simultaneously realizing that maybe the legacy that I thought I wanted is for the birds, or at the very least, for other people. Someone once said to me, “if you entertain people for a few minutes every once in a while, then who are you to complain?” He was right, and it’s something that I’ve survived off of lately. And even though I still feel like I don’t have enough time, for the first time, I actually am more prone to walk away from it all rather than try to bash my head against the wall and make things happen at a faster pace, because there’s simply more important things to focus on.
But don’t count me out yet. I mean, I’m only turning thirty this year. Even Jesus got thirty three years before he saved the world. That is, if I believed in that stuff.
