How to handle getting old. Seriously.

First you need to come to terms with the problem: an inevitable, irreversible state of decay. This is the first part of what will happen when you are dead and in your grave. It is a problem without a solution. Just accept that. You can slow things down, and talk yourself into being okay with it, but it does not matter, you are dying already.

Alcohol
If you drink enough you simply will not care about growing old. It just will not matter. The sense of life slowly seeping out of your pores with every passing second will fade away and you will be as unconcerned about aging as when you were young. Alcohol brings you into the moment, allows you to forget past and future and be here, now.

Being an asshole
Just by having enough experience with people and relationships you should have learned how to hurt feelings effectively. You also know that you have nothing to lose. Being able to make others genuinely miserable with the things you say helps to alleviate your sense of helplessness in the face of death by making you feel powerful and superior to them.

Going crazy
Remove all your inhibitions and do pretty much anything you feel like doing. All there is left to experience is death. It is coming soon. If you think seriously enough about your death, then nothing else matters. The approval and sensibilities of those around you are insignificant, the rules and obligations of society are likewise minor considerations.

Being kind, helpful, and using your life-experience to help others
Bullshit. They have no interest in hearing from you and are basically just waiting for you to get buried so they can pick through your belongings like old women at a yard sale. To them you are a useless old husk whose value is in your possessions. Most people need to suffer to learn, so good advice will go unheeded.

About Committing Suicide, 5 Points

1. A relatively surefire method
Meaning it has to kill you, not leave you to suffer, damaged and sentient in some hospital room, unable to finish what you started without help. They say that you need to jump off something really high to be certain, that that’s the closest to surefire you will ever get.

2. A method that is psychologically appealing
Meaning that you can see yourself following through on. For example: lots of people can’t stand the sight of blood so the thought of cutting wrists turns their stomachs.

 

3. Absolute certainty
Seeing that there is usually no coming back from this, this is not for those who are dithering or tremulous on any level. If you have to think about it you probably are not ready. There can be no questions anywhere in your mind.

4. No one you care about leaving behind
This has to be selfish and completely private by definition. If at any point anybody else other than you crosses your mind you probably are not ready. You have to be fixated and obsessed and completely single-minded about it.

5. No opportunity for last-minute regret
In the first point in the list I pointed out the fact that with jumping off high places there is the issue of a long fall to the ground. You get to think and feel regret after you have gone past the point of no return. It is but a few moments, but there is time for conscious, pointless remorse which is not how you want to spend your last few moments. With hanging or sleeping pills or anything that takes time there is this issue. You want to opt for the kind that takes you consciousness immediately after you have made the final step.

Sometimes paranoia is the right feeling

Paranoia has a stigma to it. If you feel that people are working against you there is something wrong with you. There are conspiracies, sometimes they are grand and consist of many conspirators. To believe that you are the object of widespread hatred is not always narcissistic. Learning to recognize camouflaged hatred is an important life-skill.

Somebody hates you (1)
That's without knowing you, too. They hate you for being one of a gender or a race or a religion, or a sexual preference, or the lack of a religion. They might hate you for not being easily identified or for not overtly siding up with them. It doesn't matter who you are or what you do somebody, will hate you.

Somebody hates you (2)
They hate you, specifically. You. I don't care how lonely you are, how reclusive you are, somebody somewhere has noticed you and hates your guts. Everybody has enemies is not some cynical myth it's true. They hate you because of the way you wear your pants, the fact that you get Chinese delivered one night more a week than they do, the fact that your car is newer, or that you had an Obama yard sign a year ago. Odds are they know your name and that they search through your garbage weekly for some reason to make an anonymous call to the police.

The hatred is profound
It is an expression of any one of a number of issues they have. You are an excuse, a scapegoat, an outlet for all the emotions they have pent up and held inside them. You are the high school teacher who humiliated them in front of the class, the girl who pointed at the tiny penis and laughed, the father who subtly undermined their confidence in their teen years. You are a substitute for all the people they want to hurt and you never know why.

They will likely be sneaky about it
When people hate you for no reason they know that to just come out and tell you or to be overtly hostile would not be well received. They would look like an asshole (possibly racist, sexist, or xenophobic) to everybody and possibly crazy as well. No, they will keep it hidden behind a smile. They will then spend a lot of time looking at you, trying to find a reason they can use to legitimately hate you and to get other people to hate you as well.

You can't read minds
The fact is that there is always a fair chance that any given stranger will be hostile. It's far from a certainty, but the odds are pretty good that they don't like you or your kind. You can gamble that they are not, or you can bet that they are and act accordingly. If you are wrong in the first instance then you might get hurt. Wrong in the second and only they get hurt. Which sounds better to you? Bad people exist. Nobody disputes that. You know that there is always a possibility of evil people working to cause you harm. They exist. If they exist then that guy over there might be one of them. It's possible, if it's possible then you

People are interested
All of them. That's why TV is popular, that's why porn is addictive, it's the joy of getting to see into the private places in other people's lives. It doesn't matter how boring or unattractive you are, if there is a hole in your wall somebody will spend a lot of time on the other side of it just to be able to see you without being seen.

Cormac McCarthy Quote

"Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave."
Cormac McCarthy, The Road

In context, the quote is about life and death. In other words, life sucks but nobody wants to die, which is basically what The Road was all about. No matter how utterly miserable life gets, most people are still going to want to live, badly enough to put up with anything.

Cowardice: a logical point of view

Pessimism, anxiety and fearfulness get a bad rap. The fact is that there are tons of things out there that can make your life bad and pretending that they don’t exist or won’t happen to you is just naive. It’s best not to live in naivety. So, yes, being a pussy is sometimes a practical way of dealing with life. Not necessarily the best way, but there are good reasons that people live in cowardice. Let’s look at some of them.

1) Death- It's going to happen no matter what 
All kinds of things in life can happen to you. May happen to you. You may get cancer. Your plane may be hijacked by terrorists. You may live long enough to see your youthful looks fade. You may lose all your money and wind up living on the street. They are all possible. This one, though, this one comes to everybody and you can't run, you can't bribe your way out, you can't do anything to change it's mind. The sheer certainty of it, is what makes it more important than anything else you fear. Your whole life, every second, every problem, every good thing, all of it has to be taken with this in the back of your mind. You are here, you are reading this, and just as surely, you will be a memory soon enough, dead meat to rot or burn.

2) Tomorrow- Nobody knows for certain 
It's an unknown factor. In fact, it's the ultimate unknown factor. No amount of intelligence or computer power can solve the riddle of the day after this. We are all agnostics here. We think it's possible but we cannot be certain. It's like reaching down into a dark hole where something bad might live. You know that you will feel things tomorrow, euphoria, disappointment, maybe horror, but you don't know which. If the unknown is scary then when you wake up in the morning you should be terrified. You choose to hope for the best, you choose to think that it will be like every other day, but you don't really know. If you are smart you will make that same choice for all the things that scare you.

3) The police- They can kill you
Think about it this way: they are armed, are held to a different standard when it comes to killing people, are not chosen for their smarts, and most people trust them. Change the meaningless word "police"  the equally vague "gang" and you will see what I mean. An armed gang patrolling your streets at night, looking for a reason to stop somebody and take their money or to torture and kill them. Only morons believe that they actually have to do something wrong to get in trouble. Human beings are random, subject to error, prejudice and emotion but these are armed and have the authority to make your life miserable.

4) Rich people- Another set of rules 
The fact that a rich person can do the same things that a poor person can do is an accepted part of life. Everybody sees the bias, nobody cares, they just want to be rich too so that they can take advantage of the status quo. Some rich kid driving drunk could run into you tonight in his 350z  and never have to suffer a moment's discomfort. The newspapers and TV stations wouldn't cover it, and the district attorney would not ask for any kind of serious punishment. That's just the way it is and has always been. You live at their mercy. Just be happy they have not taken to openly hunting the rest of us for sport.

5) Food- There is something wrong with all of it 
It's either too fatty or lacking in something. Everything you enjoy will kill you and/or make you poor if you eat as much of it as you want. What you can afford is mediocre, but you need it so you buy it anyway. You are dependent on eating. You have to acquire food or you die. It's like a drug for which there is no rehab, to which you are bound by the chains of being human. You are stuck in addiction until you die.  Grocery stores are just dealers, restaurants are like shooting galleries where you go to get your "high".

6) Women- Fickle, dangerous 
Do you have any idea how different they are from us? If you are a straight guy you are stuck to them forever, forever interested, forever loving of vaginas and breasts and moans in the night. And yet they are so different from us that they might be of another species altogether. You want extraterrestrials? You want to see some weird, surreal intelligent organism before you die? Check women out. Insecure, emotional, vicious, amoral, and yet incredibly attractive. You respect them as equals and yet you cannot stop thinking about their asses. You fall in love and your happiness is at their disposal.

7) Men- When will the posturing end? 
A creature completely obsessed with status, with domination, competition and thrusting their viewpoint on other by using whatever means are at hand. You have to work with them every day, assholes who bring their egos into every little discussion about everything. Minor office-tasks become territory to be pissed on, defended for no reason other than symbolism. Projecting status to the pack. Manhood comes with slavery to the penis, and a dumb trust in women no matter how cynical you imagine yourself to be. You always fall for it. Lucy and the football. Your dumb maleness keeps you kicking and falling and kicking and falling.

8) Popular religion- They will stop at nothing 
Nor would you if you believed that your eternity depend on you doing something weird. You can get people to reduce themselves to animals on national TV to win a few hundred thousand dollars. Promise an eternity free of suffering and you can pretty much get them to do anything depending on the strength of their belief. Imagine an army of soldiers who would do anything they were told to with no hesitation and passionately, as if they had a personal stake in the outcome.

9) Kids- Annoying parasites 
While they are still children they have little of importance to think or to say, but they don't know that. They think that everything that passes through their mind is as new to you as it is to them. Some never grow out of the habit, never acquire a sense of not being smart or important. They are greedy, wanting everything while having no sense whatsoever of the value of money or the ignorance of youth until they have lost both. You think that being yours, having your genes makes them special, and maybe they are to your ego, but the pragmatic part of you sees that you just burdened the world with more average assholes.

10) Aging- It's like a disease 
Time's sewing machine embroiders death in your flesh. Every morning you wake up and look at the mirror something has changed you lost another day, another day that you won't ever be able to use, that you wasted doing something to make somebody else rich. You also died a little. Lost something that you won't have to day, a little quickness in your step, perhaps, ease of breathing, some little imperceptible thing is gone forever every 24 hours. Your wrinkles and your birthdays are like signs of how little you have gotten done, how much time you have wasted.