Someone Else's Dream

My life didn't pan out the way I thought it would, but then again I am not entirely sure how I thought it would pan out to begin with. When I reached the lowest point of my teenage years I tried to take my own life unsuccessfully. I survived and whilst I have spoken about this and the impact it has on your mental health at length in the past there is another shift in mentality that happens in the aftermath and that is the abandonment of your future, or at least the sense of ownership over it.

At this point in my life now 36 there have been other attempts and each one failed by virtue of the fact I am still here. I don't consider myself alive by determination or a sense of self preservation, there have been multiple near death experiences I have had where through no act of my own I survived - the question of why, is something I often ponder but never come up with an answer to, except to conclude that I am alive because someone or something wants me to be, this is the only way I can rationalise the fact that I am still here whilst I have lost many more people than I care to admit to suicide, sickness, and injury among other things.

Most people when they think of their future take ownership of it, they try to imagine what it would look like, what they want, their hopes, dreams, desires, and the pay-off of whatever they're working towards in the moment. I don't have any of that, I don't have anything specific that I want for myself in the future that I am willing to devote any considerable effort to pursuing, I tend not to dream of a future that's actually possible, my dreams tend to be escapist, surrealist, or fable like, or they revolve around things that have already happened. There are a lot of things that I want but from a young age I understood that happiness was something to experience in the moment not something to defer to a future point in time.

Relying on the idea of living for the moment as your source of happiness is great in theory but when your immediate environment is not conducive to happiness then it becomes incredibly difficult to actually find happiness in the moment, and with a lack of hope for the future it's inevitable that you are consumed by despair, hence the desire to escape, figuratively and literally.

The reason I say I don't take ownership of my future however is because when you reach the point where you literally don't want to be here anymore, you start to resent life itself to a point, where contemplating the future at all is tantamount to contemplating just how much longer you have to endure something that you come to regard as inherently negative. It's not that difficult to end up in this spiral either, the world will give you an abundant source of negativity if you let it, open your mind and the thing you will find it filled with most of all is the horrors the world contains within it.

I like old TV shows rather than newer ones, mainly because they reflect a time period when I myself still had some sense of innocence and ignorance to just how fucked up the world can be. As a kid I loved cartoons like the Jetsons because of the hypothetical futures they depicted, there was a sense of hope that went beyond the individual formed part of society more widely, but fast forward several decades, the better part of a century even, now some 60 years since its first syndication and society's collective imagination of what the future might hold is no longer positive.

Ask most people what they think the world will look like in a hundred years and the prospect of nuclear war is spoken about openly and with a seriousness that once gave way to facetious derision. Climate change also mars our imagination, ironically with some speculating the red planet is exactly where we will end up - or rather a small elite group of humans hand picked to propagate a new colony whilst the rest are left to die. Then there's AI and the HAL 9000 type scenarios where people predict a technocratic dystopia or automated annihilation that dooms us all.

Then there are however the pragmatists, who posit that 100 years from now the world will look the same as it does now with a few technological advances but otherwise society stagnates, adapting to a more extreme world and accepting a new normal that to us in this moment seems unfathomable but to them just seems inescapable - this is the camp I find myself in, partly due to cynicism and partly because there isn't another vision of the future I can latch onto as something I actually hope will come to fruition instead.

Despite no longer being able to find happiness in the moment as easily as I once did, I am still living my life in the moment making decisions as and when they need to be made. I don't make long term commitments anymore and haven't for quite some time. Some of the biggest decisions I ever made in my life were made in the moment and whilst I recognise that lack of forethought is what brought me to this point, I also recognise that the decisions other people made for me, or that impacted me, also brought me to this point and even if I had fought against the current, I think this is still where I would have ended up.

I don't know what my future holds, I don't feel like that is for me to dream, if I had my own way I wouldn't be here to begin with so whatever my future holds I know it won't be for me to decide. I don't know how I feel about the concepts of fate and destiny anymore, I have a lot of thoughts surrounding those two concepts and their intersectionality, some of which I have documented in past posts here on this blog but right now everything I believe is in a state of flux, I don't know what I believe anymore, all I know is that this isn't the life I chose, because I didn't choose life.

And before anyone gets concerned about my well-being and worries that I might "do something stupid" for what it's worth with so many failed attempts in my past I gave up trying to escape, I genuinely believe that even if I did try I still wouldn't succeed so what's the point. I feel like I am serving a life sentence in the literal sense.