To live is to fight winnable battles in an unwinnable war

The inevitable downfall of every single person,
The inevitable downfall of monument and vocation.
The inevitable downfall, The inevitable decay. The inevitable death.

The inevitable downfall of tradition, the downfall of what once made sense in this world,
the downfall of all that is present in our world.
Whatever we had yesterday but is gone today is because it was touched by decay.

Decay visits everyone, at some point, if not all the time.
But it visits most often the man who tries to claim his sovereignty, the man who tries to fight, and to live.
It visits these men more often because it is these men that most struggle to live.
And failure is an ever-present shadow of all struggles for victory.

Just as the tallest buildings will have the hardest fall,
those who have begun to live eventually become those with the most to lose.

Because death is the inevitable outcome of everything,
including one’s sovereignty and livelihood,
there emerges the implication that whatever you pursue,
death comes knocking, and you have to go fighting, lest you lose what you gained.
Whatever you make, whatever you gain or earn, whether it is by honest means or by deception,
what you now have is what you might lose tomorrow.

If you want to keep what you have, then you’re going to have to fight.

Our world is a constant cycle of progress and decay.
Old norms are constantly replaced by new ones, which in turn are replaced by the next.
This cycle of constant change is ultimately a cycle of conflict that is fought by the living
vs the onset of death and decay.

For some people, the decision to give up, can at least,
in part be explained by the way in which they react to external factors.
As events unfold around them,
they seem to feel as if they were backed into a corner,
and that they capitulated,
not because they wanted to, but because,
they had no other choice.

Weighed down by the feeling of hopelessness,
they begin to lose the sense of power that they once had
and they begin to feel as if they are no longer the arbiter of their own lives,
as it is now in the hands of a society now foreign and alien to them.
This is when Death slowly takes the life out of you.

This is when you know firsthand what it was like to know that the society could go on with or without you; you are no longer needed, and you are no longer wanted.

It’s bad enough when we faithfully place our fate in the system,
but another thing entirely when we fatefully place our faith in the system.
It’s bad enough that we feel dissatisfied and more powerless over the well-being of our lives,
but it’s important to note that the sense,
the feeling of being powerless exists because we know that when the system fails,
for whatever reason,
there is nothing we can do about it.

And since such failure, has becomes automated with a life of its own,
it seems that the failed social order in this no country for old men led to the deaths of its own.

With the world seemingly going forward at a faster and faster pace,
with everything in it seemingly becoming out of our control,
and as the very things we held dear dissolves into sands slips out of our hands,
will you go out on your own?
and despite the harsh reality that will meet you,
will you still go after the money?

There are those who would instead prefer to come out physically unharmed,
and yet, could it not be the case that these are the people who will come out the most harmed out of all these people?
Perhaps in a spiritual way maybe.
Perhaps it is those who quietly submit to the process of decay that end up the most hurt.
Their flesh will not be attacked, no, but something deeper than that,
their conviction, their will, their determination.
The spirit of man, the spirit of life itself.

When at war with the process of decay,
the point is not to defeat it, because you can’t.
Death comes to all of us, and so, instead, the point is to put up a good fight,
and create friction from that conflict with decay.
Live dangerously, live boldly, live!
From the fight, there is friction with decay, from this friction creates the flame,
the fire that which, as it burns, illuminates against time itself.

Now is such a route futile?
Perhaps,
but it is the only logical route that I can find should one decide to stay alive.
By being born, you have been pitted against Death,
and by choosing to stay alive, you have chosen to wage war against decay itself.
And it is out of this war, that one truly lives, before inevitably dying like everyone else.
And this route is nowhere near as saddening or as futile as the route that I see when I look around the world today.

When I look around, I see not people who live, but rather, people who are merely undead.
they understand the state of the world and yet
they choose not to live, and by that I mean to actually truly live in spite of it,
but instead choose to numb themselves from their inability to go after the money
– be it literal money or figurative money.
They instead pacify themselves through mindless consumption,
indulging in a materialistic binge droning on like uncultured swine.

To live a life without any substance is to be alive, sure,
but like drinking saltwater from the ocean,
it will kill you from the inside
And in choosing to not go for the rarer clean drinkable water,
you condemn yourself to a slow and grueling death,

Hell, you did the work for Death,
he didn’t even have to come to you, he didn’t have to track you down.
You crawled your way to him and gave him your life.

Again, and again, we seek mediocrity by distracting ourselves,
choosing to live as dead beings, rather than to die after truly living.
When I look around, that is all that I see,
people who do nothing of their misery.
When I look around, I see people stripped of their dignity,
stripped of any sense of direction,
they are demoralized,
disenfranchised,
as they degenerate into a position where they cower even further than they already are
at the sight of Death.

As decay beckons,
and it beckons all of us,
the people who have surrendered without the fight
have done the very work that Death has set out to do.

These people will suffer
 and they suffer more than those who are all shot cold-blooded. They suffer from a spirit bitter enough to be resentful at how things have turned out
and this spirit lusts and drools at the first sign of vindication.
It excitedly grunts like pigs at the first sign of redemption and yet
this spirit is too weak to do anything about it.

We dream, we fantasize, we yearn for a better world,
for our sovereignty for our destiny.
Yet we lack the conviction, we lack the will to act upon our dreams,
we dare not defy decay out of fear.
When I look around, I see vultures swarming the skies,
patiently waiting until for last of the undead corpses exhales their last breath.
We lack the courage to take Death head on.

And so, when I look around, I wish to see others, but most importantly, myself, become these fighters.
Who, with the assurance and conviction of a truly living man,
are able to defy the process of decay, if even for a moment.

Understand that, this,
this is not a winnable war!
Death will find all of us, and it will find those who have lived
and those that have merely avoided death. It is not a crime to simply avoid death,
but this is no ideal for me.
I wish to be able to find myself fighting,
because the point of living in this life is not to live forever, but to truly live, if even just for a day.
The point of fighting in a war already lost is not to win, but to fight.

Be the pawn who attempts to reach the other side to become a queen while fully accepting that he might die on the way there but more importantly, even if he does make it, that the game will still end, and he will end up in the same box as the other pawns.

If instead of a queen, you feel like a pawn in his journey to become a knight in the chess game of life while doing it, then it’s fine by me — just don’t do it to become the queen or knight, do it to become. Live to live, not to have lived.

As society becomes chaotic,
as it begins to feel like it accelerates faster than we can come to terms with it,
as it feels like all that makes up society becomes automated,
and that we have no say
or that we are of no use to the system,
as decay beckons
and as it comes knocking on our door,
the point is not to get that money,

the point is to try.

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