Life and Such

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on."  -Robert Frost

I've been contemplating the meaning of the eternal question...  what's the point of life?  I once asked my friend that, and he responded, "My only answer is to make it through each day and try to make the people around me a little happier in the process."  That's always seemed like a good answer to me, but it's not enough.  It's not enough because I'm apparently incapable of making the people around me happy.  If that were my sole purpose in life, then I might as well kill myself, because I'm a failure.  Some say that I will find purpose in my son, but I remain unconvinced.  That will be a part of my life, no doubt, but that also doesn't seem like the whole answer.

Right now I live solely to please other people.  As in, I know that my not being alive would make some people really sad, and I don't have a desire to hurt anyone.  But because of that, I have to find something to live for.  At this moment I don't even know how I would define a "win condition."  I have no goals.  For the past 15 years or so, my goal has been to get married and have a family.  Boy did I fuck that up.  I'm honestly not sure how I could have fucked that up any worse.  Granted, some of it (or most of it) wasn't exactly my fault, but I still made the decisions that led to all of this nonsense.  I couldn't have been taken advantage of if I hadn't put myself in that position.

So on the way home today, I was asking myself...  What do I want now?  My answer was, surprisingly, the same as it's always been.  I want a family.  I want to come home to people whom I love...  and people who love me.  I want to go to little league games, piano recitals, dance lessons, gymnastics...  I want to eat around the dinner table and share stories from our day...  I want to go to the zoo and the park and the museum and have a good time...  I want to live.  I've been told by my estranged wife that all of that stuff is "superficial bullshit" (that's an exact quote), but she is at least somewhat wrong.  My answer is that LIFE is pointless bullshit.  The lives we live and the things we do...  it means nothing!  At some point in the future, every one of us will be dead and gone, and at some point after that, someone on earth will speak our name for the very LAST time.  At some point, someone will think of us for the very last time, and everything we've ever done will be inconsequential.

But you know what?  While I'm still alive, there are some things that are important to ME, and I have the right to believe in them.  Importance does have a scale.  A coworker asked me what my future plans were the other day, and I responded that I intended to live out my life and die alone.  He thought that answer was insane.  When pressed, I admitted that there was one person in the world whom I would trust enough to have a relationship but that I was pretty sure she was no longer interested.  He said, "So you just intend to sit around all alone for the rest of your life and play video games?"  When he put it that way, it sounded a lot less appealing.  That's what started me on this train of thought.

I have to find better answers.  I have to find better answers for my son.  I can't make any more mistakes.

And I have no idea what I'm doing.