Death.

During a meeting I had with this ideal employer from the Software Havens, they emphasized the fact that they offer to their candidates equal opportunities.

And so does death. It doesn’t give a shit about the content of your wallet, your age, looks, if you give money to poor people, if you believe in God or if you’re an atheist, not even if you led a healthy life or not.

Unlike my potential client, for whom your IQ makes a big difference, there is this logic error that we all commit, no matter how many Phds and MBAs are written on our business card: we all think we’re immortal. And as we have so much time on our hands we indulge ourselves in existential questioning.

The abstract reflections. Why is my life so boring? Isn’t there more to it than work? He loves me, he loves me not. And the concrete ones. Will I ever own a red Ferrari? We’ll they ever eliminate corruption in this chaotic country? Oh, if only I were a bit slimmer… If only I were born in Germany…

What a fuck! The mental activity performed for the sake of it is what sets us apart from the cat (no, I ain’t gonna accept the kitty is able of introspection!), the dandelion and the sprout (fuchsia aardvarks not included). So why not spending the billion years of our life investigating the billion plus one motives why it isn’t perfect?!

I ain’t saying the dimension and nature of our problems doesn’t equal the size of our inner world, our home. The only world we remember experiencing. I pay my deep respects to the creative results that existential questioning delivered us: psychoanalysis, Munch, Heidegger, religious systems. I respect grief (even if it’s for your defunct kitty), post-traumatic disorder, the decision to slice your veins because you actually felt you couldn’t bear it anymore.

However, self-pity and endless meditation on the negative aspects of our lives is highly similar to masturbation: an excellent way to discover ourselves and to have some fun, and a pathetic one when it becomes a lifestyle. How I would gladly embark all the wankers and whiners and send them for a trip to the real world, so they’d actually have something to complain about!

I heard that! Who the fuck am I to cast the first stone? I mean, I even have a Master Degree in the art of complaining about how our parents caused our present unhappiness. Ironically, it wasn’t the 6 years I invested in learning this art that helped me get ten inches closer to reality.

It was crossing the street in India and plugging the anti-mosquito apparatus every evening. That’s what taught me that my complaining that my life is boring, that the time I spend thinking of alternative pasts are just pure shit. See, all these are abstract, non-concrete, unreal things. The mosquito that might have bitten me if hadn’t plugged in the machinery and the consequent malaria were real things.

Complaints and endless existential questioning make us live in an unreal world, where death isn’t a fact, but only an abstract motive of negative thoughts. And as a result, it doesn’t press us to enjoy life, as it might end ANY minute.

See, death is not about the beauty of the daffodils growing on our fresh grave, nor about the angels taking us to fluffy clouds or about sacrificing ourselves to save our land from the Russian invaders. That’s the poetical side of it. It’s about unbearable pain, surgery, a call you receive one day saying the beloved one had a car accident, disfiguration, not being able to go to the toilet unattended, coughing blood, endless fear.

And unlike the fear that one will fail his exams, won’t get a raise, or that some lover won’t answer to a desperate message, this fear IS actually based on the worst case scenario.