I've been developing a nihilist attitude since the dawn of September. I mean, why try to find love when you know it's just going to end someday, maybe 1 or 2 years? Why waste investing time on hollow things that just simply disappear if popped too hard?
Why try to keep pushing onwards, if onwards is really just going deeper into the rabbit hole without any profit of any form?
Something like this?More seriously, I have trouble relating. There's always more to do, and there's no reason to compare happiness to happiness. There will be ups and downs throughout life, but without that life would be a meaningless white noise. There's also no reason to think that one high is a down just because it isn't the highest high.
Personally, I have goals, but they're vaguely defined. They're not things that are ever really going to be finished, but they are things that grant me plenty of opportunity at any point in time to look back and see how far I've come. There will always be more art to create and to collect. For example, my music collection alone is a process that I expect to take decades just to catch up. I want to perfectly tag, rate, and organize everything into playlists that dynamically generate for any occasion with complete album art, band and album history/trivia, lyrics, etc. I've only accomplished parts of this process for a varying portions of my growing library, and I get some satisfaction every time I take a step back and look at how it's progressed.
More important than having things to work towards is the knowledge that I'll never run out of things to experience in this world, and I really want to experience it all. It's not so much about identifying things that I'll enjoy and going and doing them. It's about reality being inconceivably vast, and your personal growth as an infinite process of mapping out that vastness insignificant piece by insignificant piece. Every experience, good or bad, adds a little bit to that map, and the size of that map is the completeness of your life. In my opinion, this is the thing that you should be able to reflect on and take satisfaction in. The size of the whole, not the quality of the highlight reel.
My sad: I was dragged along to a party thrown by my wife's classmate friend, when I'd just began to feel like I was recovering from the social exhaustion of the past weekend. This is the first time I've met her and I didn't know anybody there. They spent the whole night playing a game I was totally uninterested in (Cards Against Humanity: basically a one-dimensional "adult" humor generator). Classmate's husband is an Afghanistan veteran who made frequent comments throughout the night, weakly presented as humor, about how the entire population of Afghanistan needs to be wiped out because they're all savages. Thankfully, I was able to get away with spending 3/4 of the event napping, playing Sil, and taking care of the kids.