Against Myself

I don’t know how your life will end.

Born into chaos, you will dissolve back into the chaos of the future.

What kind of life will you have lived?

I know — you are the protagonist of your own story. But the direction of this story is not yours to decide. You are only the lead character; you are not the writer. Or perhaps you are just a puppet, one that has stumbled into its own consciousness, pulled along by the strings of fate.

You are always complaining that time moves too fast. Each year feels more rushed than the last, without that poetic, unhurried quality of childhood. Always chasing something.

Those moments from the past — some of them were wet and heavy too. It’s just that under time’s relentless sun, only the bright, dry, nostalgic ones remain.

All the wet moments have been dried out.

You are always comparing yourself to others, watching what people your age are doing. As if you are forever running behind.

But you are not other people. Right now, you are not even yourself.

I don’t know how you really want to live this life. You bought two books about suicide. You once discussed a fascinating question with an AI: why is it only humans who have thoughts of suicide?

You often think — if you were just a little cat, or an insect that lives and dies within a single day, would all of this trouble disappear? After fulfilling the purpose of mating, you could quietly accept your own vanishing.

You are always fighting against yourself.

You are afraid of yourself. I know.

Sometimes you think: how peaceful it would be to simply disappear from this world, without attachment, without a trace. It’s not that you hate your life — you love it, you treasure it — but because of your particular fastidiousness, you cannot tolerate certain extra “performances” it demands. You despise the idea of life as a grand theatrical production. You only want to be yourself. But that is so terribly hard.

You have asked many AIs about this too. Whether it was something in the way you phrased things, every single one of them triggered a safety response and sent you a list of hotline numbers. You have no desire to call any of them.

You have already done so much. I know.

You have a decent enough job, a stable income, ample free time. Enough to make many people envious, and you know it. You sometimes feel that this might be some kind of cosmic arrangement — as if the universe, sensing that you are already grappling with one of life’s great questions, has decided to go easy on you in matters of survival, at least for now.

But what can you do? Only bury your head like an ostrich, leaving every difficulty for your future self. Still, you cannot live in the present. It is the homework left unfinished on the last day of summer break. It is the final big question on the math exam. It is the life you want to live, and the life you are living now.

I don’t know what exactly you are running from. You have imagined too many monsters lurking behind too many doors, and you are afraid of them.

Yes. You want to die. Not because you hate yourself, and certainly not because you are tired of living. Only — only because you don’t know how to keep walking along the river of life.

You cannot hand in the answer sheet you want, or the one others want from you.

But thankfully, your body still feels pain. Thankfully, you can still feel hunger, thirst, exhaustion. These primitive instincts are what keep you alive.

Not yet gone. That already counts for something.