Maybe it’s just because my 28th birthday is in a week, but I’m feeling extra shitty about my life choices lately. By all accounts, I’m doing pretty ok: I’m making a living off a career I chose in high school and still love (with a fucking art school degree), I’m living in one of the best cities in the world and I’m about to move across the country to another one, I’m fairly attractive, decently in shape, and I have a boyfriend who loves me. I’m healthy, I’m paying off my student loans, and I’ve got amazing credit. So why do I feel like I’m wasting my life?

You’re basing your entire sense of purpose off of a checklist, and it’s not even your own fucking checklist. You’re trying to attain spiritual fulfillment using cultural capitalism’s default settings for being a good consumer. Sorry, but that’s a recipe for a big fat existential crisis.

Set the checklist aside and start leading an examined life. Go deep. I’m talking about religion here. Not the canned stuff, obviously, but real religion. Primal stuff about nature and consciousness and the mysteries of the universe. Ask the big questions. Explore the human condition. Get busy with moral philosophy, metaphysics, and aesthetics. Soak it all up. Learn, and then go do.

It doesn’t really matter what you end up believing or how you end up putting it all into practice. The process itself is how you discover a life worth living.

(Oh, and happy fucking birthday!)

After 3.5 years together, he ended it. Out of nowhere (from my perspective.) I thought everything was fine. I thought we were going to get married and have kids. He led me to believe that was the case. Now all of a sudden it’s over. I live in his apartment – everything is his. I own nothing, have no money, no plan. I centered my life around him, which was my own fault. I feel like I’ve been cracked open and nothing is left. I’ve never felt so low and I’m starting to feel genuinely scared of what’s going on in my own mind. I don’t want to be here anymore. I can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. Everything’s dark.

Pack a bag, empty his bank account, and buy a one-way ticket to a city far, far away. Better yet, take his car and drive there. Find an apartment with roommates. Get a job, go to school, make friends. Build an entirely new life.

I’m deadly serious about all of that, but if it seems too extreme, then just start by packing a bag. Get out of his apartment as soon as possible. That’s the first step towards feeling whole again.

There’s no way you can see this yet, but you’ve been given a rare and precious gift. You get a fresh start with a clean slate. You get to hit the reset button on your life, and as terrifying as that sounds, it’s likely going to be one of the most profound and necessary experiences of your life.

Get going. You can do this.

I knew my dad was going to die soon. It took fifteen minutes to resuscitate him two days prior. We agreed with the doctor not to be aggressive in treatment after they extubated him.

When he regained consciousness, it was without awareness, his tongue lolling and his eyes rolling into his head. He would barely focus on people when they spoke directly to him. He couldn’t answer even the simplest questions.

His breathing was labored and fast. As they gave him sedatives and pain medication it began to turn wet and I imagined it would soon culminate in either a severe struggle, or series of terrible and unforgettable sounds. Between machines with alarms going off and the sounds of him drowning, it might be unbearable.

My mother, not fully understanding the situation, kept trying to talk to him. I carefully weighed leaving my father to die alone against saving my mom from an experience that might destroy her. I honestly felt that if she had to remember my father’s death rattle she would literally go insane. I know I only barely felt strong enough to believe I could.

To my mind, my father had already died. Forcing her to watch as the nurses swept away the pieces just didn’t seem right. Or worse, some terrifying moment of struggle that made her feel even more powerless would just be torture.

I told her I would take her home to rest. We said our goodbyes and promised to check on him the next day. Both doctors had already explained the prognosis was extremely poor. And my mom tried to push it aside by saying that she didn’t like this doctor or that doctor.

Moments after we got home the phone rang and we were asked to return as my father had passed. I looked out the window and it began to rain. Even after all that contemplation, I still don’t know if I did the right thing. Did I?

The week before, when he finally got the tube out the last time, he finally said, “I love you.” Something I swear he’s only said to me maybe twice before. And I couldn’t understand him through the mask clearly enough to be certain. I asked him to repeat it but he was very weak and didn’t. I feel like I denied him that. And then, I abandoned him.

I don’t know what to feel. But I am hurting.

Did I do the right thing?

Yes, you did the right thing. You needn’t carry any measure of guilt for not bearing witness to the exact moment of your father’s death. He certainly wasn’t conscious at the end, and you had already said your goodbyes. You spared your father a final indignity and you protected your mother from further trauma. You did what you thought was best, and it seems like it was exactly what your father would have wanted you to do.

And no, you didn’t abandon him. You didn’t deny your father any opportunity to express how he felt about you. He had an entire lifetime to express how he felt, and if he wasn’t the kind of man to tell you that he loved you, then that’s on him. That’s his missed opportunity, not yours.

My condolences on your loss, for whatever that’s worth. It’s perfectly okay to not know what to feel right now, and it’s going to hurt for a very long time. It’s supposed to. Don’t rush trying to feel normal again. It’ll happen when it happens.

I don’t feel worthy of the kind of person I want to date. I’m working on my body, my career, my life, but feel like I can’t start looking for a partner until I’m in some perfect spot in the future that might never come. This also bleeds into friendships where I crave closeness but also can’t let myself drop my guard enough to build that intimacy.

How would you advise someone works on this? Apart from therapy. I’m looking into that as soon as my insurance kicks in.

I wish confidence was a bodily fluid. I wish I could spend my nights catching average white men in nets baited with vinyl records and vape pens and then milk their excess confidence like snake venom. That’s all you need, really, a healthy dose of the undeserved confidence of an average white man. (And by average I don’t mean typical. I mean mediocre. Those uninspired fuckers are brimming with the stuff.) I wish I could bottle up that warm, slippery goo and then sell it to people like you on the black market. I’d be rich and you’d be happy and the world would be a better place.

In lieu of this service, all I can do is attempt to inspire you to build your own confidence through mental and emotional exercise like some personal trainer of the soul. That’s a bit of a trick for me, because it’s difficult to inspire someone like you without dragging out a sackful of stale-ass Tony Robbins style self-help clichés about tuning into the present moment and not letting the perfect become the enemy of the good.

I mean, shit. I hope your insurance kicks in and all, but you don’t need a therapist to tell you that the future doesn’t exist. It never has and it never will, especially the one in your head where you’ve accumulated enough external indicators of value to finally warrant being loved by someone.

This moment right here and right now is all you’ve got. It’s fine to work on your body, your career, and your life, but not for the sake of some far off imagined future. The work you do has to give you sustenance now. Start getting messy today. Let your fucking guard down already. Take a risk. It doesn’t have to come from a place of confidence. It can come from a place of howling terror, as long as it comes. As long as you come. Now. Do it.

Now.

I don’t have a syringe full of undeserved white man confidence, but I am high enough at the moment to instead give you literally just one word of advice:

Now.

One more time for the cheap seats:

Now.

Is a glass of water or a punch in the face always wrong?

Absolutely not. I’m not some syrupy idiot who believes the cliché that violence is never the answer. Violence is a powerful tool, and when used for good, it is the purest form of necessary evil. (Of course, what people believe to be good is inevitably where we get into trouble when it comes to justifying violence.)

As for me personally, I believe hurling drinks and punching people to be generally wrong, but I also believe punching Nazis like Richard Spencer in the face or throwing water on garbage monsters like Tomi Lahren to be highly individualistic forms of civil disobedience, and in those specific instances, there is a greater good to consider. That said, it’s still assault, so don’t go around doing that kind of shit without being fully aware of the potential consequences. It is against the law to assault people, even shitty people, (as well it should be), but just because something is illegal, that doesn’t make it inherently wrong.

Also consider this: if the drink is hurled or the fist is thrown on impulse and out of anger, then you’re gonna lose most of your moral high ground. Outside of genuine self-defense, it is incredibly difficult to justify violence that stems from impulse or anger. Another thing to consider is proportionality. Throwing water on Tomi Lahren and ruining her night is a proportional response to her presence at the bar, whereas throwing acid on her would be completely unjustifiable. Punching Richard Spencer in the face and ruining his day is a proportional response to his presence at the Nazi rally, whereas shooting him in the face would be completely unjustifiable. Outside of total war, it is impossible to justify violence that isn’t proportional.