Life Makes Me Sad

Life makes me sad.

Not in a, “oh my god the way I live is pathetic and I should just surrender to the void” type of way though.

I’ll spend the occasional morning in my bed, drinking room temperature gin out of last night’s solo cup while I watch YouTube compilations of people crashing expensive cars they thought they could handle, and if I died that way, I would be one satisfied guy.

I’m not sad for me.

No, usually if I feel profoundly sad, it’s what I’m feeling for other people.

I feel sad when I think about all the parents who feel like they’ve let their kids down by not giving them the best possible life. In that same vein, I feel for kids who think they let their fantastic parents down by not being something more than what they are.

I feel sad when I see a cashier on the verge of a mental collapse in the middle of a twelve hour shift because someone’s chewing them out; calling them horrible things over the way they bagged a t-shirt.

I feel sad thinking about people being less happy than they could be because nobody ever told them they were worth a damn, so they just accept a miserable station in life, instead of being the next Freddie Fucking Mercury. They never feel the grass beneath their feet because they were told that’s not the way things are done.

Couples that settled for each other, saying unbelievably hurtful things to one another because it’s gotten so far along that it’s just easier to think that love is deeply intimate maliciousness instead of two people celebrating their bond and their individualism.

I wouldn’t consider myself a truly empathetic person, but it breaks my heart that we often think it’s okay to live in a way that isn’t fulfilling because “it is what it is.”

And there’s no practical answer to that kind of pain. We deny ourselves happiness and we talk ourselves into being unhappy, and then we encourage that state of mind in other people, because it’s all just so fucking hard. We buckle so hard under the weight of all that we can’t help lighten the loads of others.

There’s no overall message to this, I’m not gonna get ready for the day and spread “positive vibes,” or whatever. I’ll be a piece of shit by noon, and I’ll go back to hedging my bets and taking a limited number of chances on myself as I tell myself things’ll be different come next week, next month, New Year’s Day.

But I will pray to the gods and goddesses that shit will change for at least a few of these hypothetical people today.