A fate resigned
How to cope
There are few things in life worse than unrequitedness, but still, it’s not the worst.
The worst thing in life is not being able to cope with your fate, unrequited or otherwise. Futility is a more severe degree of unrequitedness. We all experience feelings of one-sidedness, almost as though we are living entities in a cold lifeless universe, but every now and again we descend into futility. We mostly move along accepting our fate, but when we begin to feel sorry for ourselves, we’re lost into a pit of despair. The only way out is a cope. Shit is futile, so when it is, let it be. Accept it, and stop pushing. Rebellion for rebellion’s sake is not a worthy ideal.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t stretch and rebel against futility. No, there’s a time and place for pushing and pulling. What I’m talking about is the time for acceptance. When things seem their absolute worst and you’ve pushed and pulled all you can. What else is there to do? In times like this, we must relinquish the need for rebellion. But how to recognize these times?
I think there’s one way to tell: oscillating psychological and physical catatonia. When we reach the point where we wish to move but physically cannot, and conversely, we don’t wish to move, but our bodies keep pushing. When we meet one or both of these states, we’ve reached an endpoint, and there is some level of acceptance required.
We all have limits, like it or not.
There’s intuition in finding these limits that human reason hasn’t yet spelled out. Give it time, I’m sure we’ll calculate the ideal numbers that indicate our boundaries, but for now, we go on gut instincts.
Some of us are throwing the towel in too soon, and some of us are pushing beyond our means. We’re all breaking down trying to find our boundaries. Is there not wisdom in learning from each other then? Not if we are obstinate. Not if we assume bad faith. This is where the digitization of the world is breaking us before our time. We have to resist the inhumane digital and work towards injecting our humanity into it. We can’t resist the digital altogether. We have to come together within it. We must resign to our fate to move forward, together.
Come to book club on Saturday. 6PM PST/9PM EST