Here’s a bit of prophecy – the world WILL end in your lifetime.
One way or another, your life will end. Existence, as you know it will end. Fear not the second coming, fear your own personal apocalypse which is guaranteed.
Put another way, on a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Are you ready? Is your life, as it is right now, what you want? Are you happy with your life as it is?
Many people fail to consider their lives until they have a near death experience. Most people don’t get a near death experience, and once your life is finished here on earth, you don’t get a second chance.
Dismal as it sounds, this should be received joyfully. You are alive today, are you not? You have yet a chance to change the course of your life, and to enjoy your life.
Two works of fiction come to mind in considering this – in a brutal and violent way.
First (already quoted above) is the cult film Fight Club.
(warning: mild language in this clip)
As the frightened clerk flees, Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt) remarks:
“Tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of Raymond K. Hessel’s life. His breakfast will taste better than any meal you and I have ever tasted.”
The second work of fiction is Manalive, written in 1912 by G.K. Chesterton.
Accused of murder, an eccentric named Innocent Smith is charged with repeated attempts of murder. The first of these attempts is of a pessimistic professor, Dr. Eames, who in a discussion with Smith likens the sorry state of life to a puppy that should be put down. Even though he struggles, says Dr. Eames, the act of killing the beast would be an act of mercy.
“Dr. Eames had turned his tired but still talkative head over his shoulder, and had found himself looking into a small round black hole, rimmed by a six-sided circlet of steel, with a sort of spike standing up on the top. It fixed him like an iron eye. Through those eternal instants during which the reason is stunned he did not even know what it was.
Then he saw behind it the chambered barrel and cocked hammer of a revolver, and behind that the flushed and rather heavy face of Smith, apparently quite unchanged, or even more mild than before.
`I’ll help you out of your hole, old man,’ said Smith, with rough tenderness. `I’ll put the puppy out of his pain.’”
Smith lectures the professor at the point of the gun, and fires two shots, intentionally missing him. Understanding the point, the professor expresses his gratitude for Smith’s violent method of rejuvenating his outlook on life.
Smith announces that he will continue his course, calling the bullets in his revolver “pills for pale people” and promising:
“I am going to hold a pistol to the head of the Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill him–only to bring him to life.”
Don’t wait for someone to hold a gun to your head to examine your life and find it worth living – and worth living well.
