Wasting my time?

It’s been so depressing around these parts lately.

My birthday is coming up soon, and it’s caused me to jump back into thinking about my own mortality.  After all these years of dwelling on it, it’s still really kind of a hard thing to wrap my head around… I mean, eventually, we will all just cease to exist.  There’s no way to prevent it.  (And honestly, even if you could, would you?)  The thing that fucks me up the most is thinking about how we will be perceived and remembered by the people that are still around after we die.

The cold hard facts are that in the end, 99.99999% of us aren’t going to be remembered in the long run.  Part of me can’t handle that; knowing that eventually, it’ll be like I was never even on this planet at all.  The other part of me really doesn’t care – if the vast majority of people won’t be remembered, why should I be any different?

It gets my head spinning, really it does.  If I were a religious person, I’m sure I could find solace in thinking that I won’t need to care about any memory left behind when I die, ’cause I’ll be so busy reuniting with people in the afterlife.  That’s just… not the case, though.  And to be honest, I’m such a selfish person that even if I were religious, I know that the thought of being forgotten would still get to me.  It’s just how I am.  It’s not necessarily egomaniacal (even though it kind of is), it’s just unavoidable since I don’t ever think about the spiritual side of death - that’s where my mind always tends to end up.

As with every birthday in the past few years, the dwelling on death always leads me to question my current station in life.  Exactly a year ago, I felt pretty good about life.  I was working a full-time gig in a major radio market… and loving it.  I had a side job, but it was purely for the perks and extra money on the side – I didn’t need it.  I wasn’t really making any progress on working toward my dream job, but I was paying off outstanding debts and paving a pretty good path towards a decent future.  I at least had some breathing room (monetarily) that if something big were to go down, I was prepared.

Now?  I can’t believe how much things have changed in a year.  Now I’m working only part-time in radio (albeit the same market, so there’s that at least), and the side job I used to work for fun I now rely on for much needed money to pay for… everything.  Of course, that situation places me even farther from my dream job… and forget about paying debts on time, if at all.  Along with all that comes a crippling depression (which comes with the awesome pack-in of lower self-esteem).  Rad.

So, my birthday comes in a few days here.  I heard a saying recently: “A year in your twenties is worth two in your thirties, and worth five in your forties.”  To be honest, that makes a lot of sense to me.  On my birthday, I’ll have three years before I enter my thirties… that scares the bejeezus out of me.  Knowing that I could squeeze a potential fifteen years into the final years of my twenties is a really invigorating thought.  At the same time, it’s also depressing, because what happens if those three years are as bad (if not worse) for me than the past year has been?

The whole duality thing comes in again.  One part of me is saying that I can make those years count, and I really can.  The other part of me is saying that I can only do so much, and a lot of it is out of my hands.

*shrug*  I really need to get some sleep.