Life wouldn't be this difficult if there weren't any people around. I've had these thoughts all my life about what the world would be like without anyone else on the planet to keep me company. I don't think I get as depressed about it as I'm supposed to.
I look at all of these books and films about some guy being the last man on earth and the perils he goes through.
Probably the best Twilight Zone episode of all time involves a man that only wants to read, but his job and his wife keep him from his passion. When an atomic bomb goes off and he survives, he wanders the destroyed city until he finds a library. With the rest of time on his hands to read all the books in a library, he settles down to live passionately. Until his glasses break, rendering him blind.
His last words - There was time now.
It's a great message. One that continually comes up, and should on a daily basis. Why waste another minute not living passionately? Doing what you love?
The answer: people.
They get in the way. Let's face it. They constantly destroy plans, want without compromise, create rules and social structures that deny freedom and art, insist that you do things their way, scoff at you when you tell them how you really feel, what you really dream of, what you'd like to sculpt yourself into.
People are the worst.
And yet without them, without some semblance of structure that they bring, the dynamic array of options they present - life would be much blander. After all, who would write all those books for us to read? Who would stay up until four in the morning with us talking about nothing at all? What would really shape our personalities and our philosophies?
It makes me wonder - even knowing that people are a powerful concept - if there's anything else in life that's so detestable, yet so sublime and necessary. Is there something that causes us such dissatisfaction from time to time that we still desperately need? Is there something that almost always lets us down that we can't live without?
Despite my romanticism of living alone on the planet, I find myself addicted to people. Or maybe I'm just addicted to frustration. And traffic.
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