Ugh, so masturbatory and such fail.

As I said in the comments over there, man, on one level I get it. At some point in your life it sinks in that the work is never done, that things just get harder and harder, that there's always another thunderstorm around the corner and the life you imagined, where at some point it stops being such a job all the time, isn't coming. 

I have been physically and emotionally exhausted since I was 19 years old, and in comparison that chick I am lazy as hell, and I GET IT. You want to watch TV. You want to go to work and come home and cook food and watch TV, maybe read a book, and not worry so much that the earth is caving in and you're not doing enough to stop it. You want to sleep at night, thinking you've done enough and it's now somebody else's turn. 

Deep down, you know it's never somebody else's turn. In the hour between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m., an hour I am coming to loathe the sight of, you always know you're not working hard enough to make the world you want to live in. Undone things on the to-do list, everything from laundry to life goals, are chasing after you like dogs, snarling at your heels, and you want to shut them up. 

So you say somebody else is doing it wrong, somebody else isn't picking up your slack, somebody else should be working harder, somebody else should be working more. You make it about what he or she over there isn't doing, and maybe for ten minutes you can sleep. 

It's so poisonous, the notion that you're ever done. It's why the young hate the old and the old hate the young, why we have stupid arguments about how many people it took to write the Beatles' songs versys Beyoncé's, why we explain away poverty as choices, why we can't stop telling ourselves fairy stories every fucking election cycle. It's so poisonous and small and mean, and it all stems from the idea that you ever, ever get to stop trying to be a better human being. 

You don't get to do that. Not at 20 and not at 40 and not at 60 and not on your goddamn deathbed. You don't get to be done so long as there are things you can see as need doing. I am on a mission, right now, in my work and in my life, to ban the phrase "we should" and replace it with "I will" because if you can see the problem you have an obligation to solve it. Not when you're in college, not when you don't have kids or a house, not when you're retired. When you see the problem. Right fucking now, today. 

That means you're tired. So what? 

A.