this is teenage nihilism, i guess?
In the year 2525, I’m going to be long dead. I was born in 1988. By the time 2525 rolls around, I’ll be lucky if I have a gravestone all to myself. In the year 2525, you’ll be dead, too. At that point in time, that far in the future, your only connection to me will be that we’ll both be dead. I know that I’m going to be satisfied with a simple life, a wife and kids, a home and a job that makes me happy. I don’t want to do anything world changing or earth shattering, I don’t want to be president or prime minister or king or lord or anything like that. By the time 2525 rolls around, anything that I’ll have done with my life will long since have disappeared. Any children that I have will be dead, and their children will be dead, and so will their children. Assume three generations in a hundred years, that’s fifteen generations by the time we hit 2525. Even assuming my bloodline lasts that long, there will be virtually no connection between me and whoever my descendents might be. The same goes for you, anybody who ever thought about you will be dead by the year 2525. The people in that year, in that time, they’ll have their own problems to solve, their own issues to resolve. They won’t care a bit if I’m happy right now, or if you know where your life is going, or if your plans for this summer work out or if you’re making friends and finding yourself and figuring out what your major is. They won’t care that I like Japanese or that you’re a dancer or that you don’t like kissing or that the girl you love lives in DC or that you left high school a year early. None of that will be important to them at all, whoever they are. Just like we don’t care about their problems. Maybe somebody in the year 2525 will have to choose between living with their mother or living with their father, and they love both of them equally and it’s not fair to ask them to make that choice but their parents just don’t love each other anymore and the relationship isn’t working out and it’s just too goddamn hard to make it work right now so you need to make a choice, okay?
It’s not my problem. I’ve got my own problems to worry about, and while I hope stuff works out for that poor kid, whoever he or she is, there’s not a lot I can do. The only possible way I could help is if that little kid ends up being descended from me, and I tell my children to tell their children not to fuck up with a marriage and to not get divorced or whatever, and they tell their children, and that happens another twelve times. Also, the fourteenth time it happens, the kid needs to listen. But with that in mind, look at the beginning of this whatever this is. By the year 2525, when all that will happen, I’ll be long dead and nobody will remember or care about the things I did, the things I said. And so in that sense, it doesn’t matter what I do right now, that you’re just not that into me or whatever. All I need to do is make it through one day at a time with whatever I have with me, and I should be able to do that. I’ll die eventually (long before 2525, at least) and hopefully I’ll be happy when it happens, or happy that it happens, or just happy that it happened when it did, instead of earlier. Or just happy. That’s what I really want, I think. And 2525 will take care of itself.
It’s not my problem. I’ve got my own problems to worry about, and while I hope stuff works out for that poor kid, whoever he or she is, there’s not a lot I can do. The only possible way I could help is if that little kid ends up being descended from me, and I tell my children to tell their children not to fuck up with a marriage and to not get divorced or whatever, and they tell their children, and that happens another twelve times. Also, the fourteenth time it happens, the kid needs to listen. But with that in mind, look at the beginning of this whatever this is. By the year 2525, when all that will happen, I’ll be long dead and nobody will remember or care about the things I did, the things I said. And so in that sense, it doesn’t matter what I do right now, that you’re just not that into me or whatever. All I need to do is make it through one day at a time with whatever I have with me, and I should be able to do that. I’ll die eventually (long before 2525, at least) and hopefully I’ll be happy when it happens, or happy that it happens, or just happy that it happened when it did, instead of earlier. Or just happy. That’s what I really want, I think. And 2525 will take care of itself.