I hate to post this on the heels of Wrath's post, but I wanted to say I feel like something's changed inside my mind this year.
A year ago, living with my parents, being unemployed, and having no car... it felt like I was at the bottom of the ocean. In fact I kept going back to the image of Angel trapped there at the end of season three.
Summary: the vampire Angel is tied up and thrown in a coffin, which is dumped at the bottom of the Atlantic. Immortal due to his vampirism, Angel won't die from lack of oxygen, so it was essentially eternal solitary confinement.
"Angel got what he deserved."
I also thought a lot about Wesley's response,
"We all get what we deserve."I bring up the TV show Angel because it's part of what's helped me. It's entry-level Philosophy 101 stuff, but the themes of existentialism really resonated with me when I started putting it in terms of my own life.
"If nothing we do matters, then the only thing that matters is what we do."
It feels like I've had a very long, shitty hangover from theism. Even though I felt like doing good things was worth it, that started taking a backseat in my personality the longer time went on. Being in Boston in particular, flush with cash, hitting bars every other night... I had a pretty serious drinking problem that I was doing everything possible to avoid confronting. It's such a terrible cliche I can barely bring myself to type it, but I had a missing piece I was trying to fill.
And the flip that switched when I went "Oh, God's not watching me every moment?" It started this insidious idea in my head that I could act publicly one way, and privately another, and it would all be cool since the only part I cared about people knowing was the public part.
But that's never really the case. The human brain is not a computer where you can just pop in a new hard drive and keep shit separate. The shitty thoughts you have in private will eventually corrupt your soul, whether God exists or not. I spent way too much mental energy hating people I thought wronged me, even though on reflection in most of those situations the problem was me.
Put another way:
Even if I
think I'm a good person, if I deliberately choose to avoid doing the right thing because it's hard or I'm worried about myself, then I'm
not a good person. It's easy to type here but so much goddamn harder to internalize in your day-to-day life. I'm still struggling with making what should be easy decisions -- apologizing to someone when I'm in the wrong, or offering to help even though I'm feeling extremely lazy. Real life doesn't have dramatic superhero moments (pardon the GIF) but every day will present new choices, and complaining that you're forced to make a choice is the wrong attitude to take. And that's basically how I thought throughout all of 2019.
Combined with my decision to abandon coding for a living forever, I feel like I have a purpose and drive that I haven't had in over 15 years. I feel like I'm making choices now, and that they're the right ones, instead of just being on autopilot.
And I'm still here, with the parents, with no car, with no job. But I've done a complete 180 in mindset from a year ago.
Uhhhh this turned out way longer than intended sorry lmao
Edit- Oh one more thing that changed me from being a pessimistic jerk who would lash out at people IRL to... someone who does that far less now, is realizing that my own decisions have led me here, and it needs to be my decisions to get me out.
More broadly, I realized the universe/society/God/Satan/whatever doesn't owe me shit. I don't deserve to be successful just because I think I should be.
This was really hammered home on Christmas, when the only thing I wanted was a new keyboard so I could resume learning to play. A 2-3 day depression and hurt feelings are what followed...
...I felt like a goddamn 8-year old.
That's when I knew I had to seriously grow the fuck up.
