I have been replacing meditation with video games and exercise with comfort food lately. As I know from… well, everyone and everything… this is common over the holidays and should be forgiven in one’s self. I would extend that courtesy to others, after all. The frustrating part is that I can remain disciplined for months at a time, checking off my daily list of things, and one month of depression and too many external needs will undo a year of work, both in mental stability and physical fitness. Why fight atrophy? My mind can find no rational response. 40 years old. Settled. Is there really any reason to do anything but wait to die? And isn’t that the most selfish thing? Living? Depleting resources that should belong to the young, the hopeful, and the ambitious?

I read recently that testosterone kills men. If a man “lets himself go,” as it were, he stands a greater chance of living a longer life. Nature created men as drones. Women have all the complex inner workings because only they serve the natural imperative of reproduction, and thus men should, by their own genetic structure, not live beyond their years of reproductive value. No wonder men collapse under the strain of mid-life crises, like the one I have fought for the last five years, maybe ten. The higher suicide rate corresponds directly to the actual purpose of male life: create something or die. By any rational, philosophical standard of modern life, that creation can not be more people. The Earth, and indeed human society, will explode under the strain of any more useless people. How can anyone compel themselves to live knowing that it amounts to nothing more than an obsolete, biological impulse? Why should we accept and indulge that impulse and not the more hedonistic ones that would birth a new Caligula state?