I understand the attraction of becoming a monk/ascetic (rant. Please read in entirety) love you.

I’m a 31 year old male living in the US of A. My teenage years were pretty abusive and dysfunctional. Spending all of my 20s just kind of drifting. Not aimless, I had goals, but very much surviving and greatly affected by the trauma I endured. It still has radically changed me to this day. I spent my 20s in the gym, deadlifting, powerlifting, dieting, building a pretty amazing physique. It was never about anyone else, truly, I just felt so at peace in the gym. At 31 though, working physical jobs my entire life and really pushing my body to its limits I do find myself in a sort of conflicted state with being young and capable and peaked out physically and the upcoming next 30+ years.

I always felt like I had potential, but unfortunately my coping mechanisms I feel have greatly hindered my ability to fulfill that potential. I’ve read many spiritual books, meditated, spent most of the last decade in solitude. And now I awake, at 31, realizing that the past decade plus was supposed to be spent progressing and i’ve unfortunately been running in place.

I understand the pull to renounce all things of this world as often times it feels like it’s all too much to bear. The building and maintaining of your health and body. The building and maintaining of your career and finances. The building and maintenance of vanity, materialism, status, friendships, family relationships. It really does all feel way too overbearing.

I don’t necessarily have the desire to get married or have children or really have the desire for much of anything? I guess at this point I desire money but that’s only because i’m so afraid of not being secure. Lately my knee has been really bothering me, and though this sounds trivial, anyone who has had an injury that lingers or something more severe, I believe it’s quite terrifying.

You begin asking yourself how you’re going to pay the bills and not become homeless. So many people, including myself, earn an income via our bodies, what happens when the body breaks? How does one continue to survive?

Most of my respect, admiration and potential romantic partners have basically all stemmed from how I look and now that i’m seeing that maintaining this physique isn’t realistic for life, I think I have begun and almost always have, resented the shallowness of it all.

It’s like a wealthy man who knows he is ugly yet gets any woman he wants because of his financial success.

It’s funny just how much of life is vanity. And I mean the root sense of the word. Not just how we look in regard to attracting others, but also our pursuits in trying to fulfill ourselves.

I see men panicking over going bald. People asking if they should get nose jobs. Diet culture. Women injecting fat into their ass. Older men and women getting botox, taking testosterone, having facelifts. I see people performing sexual acts on the internet for money, influencers trying to “looks max” and get views and likes at any cost necessary. I see people frantically trying to preserve, maintain and build in a world that is governed by entropy and decay.

I’m not saying these are bad people. It is HARD to stay in shape, to stay healthy, to BUILD something. Very very hard.

But as someone who is sort of stuck in life, career wise, purpose wise, I do find myself feeling that life feels like too big, too impossible of a challenge to tackle.

Even if I do everything right, be a kind person, don’t become a criminal, don’t have mindless hookup sex or be irresponsible, don’t succumb to drugs and alcohol, If I just stay on the straight and narrow, work hard, make a little money, save, invest…i’m still left with this existential void feeling of: “well, these years are passing me by, i’m getting more tired, more incapable, more aches, more pains, watching the circus of the modern world unfold before me as I play my tiny trivial part in my tiny little piece of earth for my tiny sliver of time in history.”

I understand the attraction of becoming a monk somewhere. Shaving my head. Not caring about baldness or no baldness (I have long hair, male, not bald or balding but you get the point), not caring about fashion, or material success or wealth. Dedicating yourself to a life of spiritual contemplation, solitude, quiet, and simply passing through.

It often times feels like many of us are just frantically jumping from one novelty experience or dopamine hit to the next. A sea of distractions. The NFL playoffs, the new Netflix drama, the political circus, a new fling, a new car, more money. I mean for me, I think my lack of ambition stems from feeling like it’s all vapid but yet necessary to survive.

Like a game many of us are forced to play cause if you don’t you pay the price 2x over. Unfortunately for myself I feel like I didn’t realize the rules of the game until later in life (like yesterday lol). And I still find trouble finding the reason to bear the suffering of life as I just don’t find it feasible to own a home, get married, have children.

For one, I don’t think I would want to bring children into this world as I myself sympathize with antinatalists. I see co workers and peers and everyday people around me, they’re fat, sick, relatively cynical, they work, go home, sleep, do it over and over slowly waiting for death.

For two, I don’t see the point in owning a home. I’m a minimalist and wouldn’t need or require anything outside of a one bedroom, but even then, that would be too much space for me.

For three, marriage, I mean, should I even speak on it? I’ve seen 3 divorces by my parents alone. I’ve seen countless single mothers. Countless single fathers. Countless appearingly perfect relationships where come to find out the girl was miserable and cheating or the guy was miserable and cheating or everything was perfect and then BAM someone had an existential or midlife crisis and then someone got half of someone elses shit. The divorce rate is insane and how many people are just staying together because they are too tired to even begin again?

I mean, honestly, the older I get, the less and less I find life to be even remotely “worth it.”

There is a movie called: The Hurt Locker. Jeremy Renner is the main actor, he is a bomb guy. Basically someone who diffuses life bombs in the Middle East for the Army. There is a final scene at the end of the movie, he is now home, working a regular job, living in a small shitty home with his wife and new baby. Juxtaposed to his highly unpredictable highly adrenalized war-life to his now simple, slow, predictable modern middle aged father life. In one of the scenes towards the end, he is grocery shopping with his wife, he stands, alone, in the middle of the cereal isle which seems to go on for miles in each direction. He looks to the left. He looks to the right. Endless, endless colorful boxes of cereal glow underneath the fluorescent lights and elevator music in the background. He frustratingly pulls a random box and continues shopping. Cut to, he is sitting alone with his baby. His baby only a few years old, unable to understand him, plays with his toy. Renners character goes on to say, “You really love that toy don’t you.” He smirks affectionately. “Yanno, when you get older, sometimes the things you love, they shrink, you begin to love less and less things, until, someday, maybe it’s only one or two things.” He sort of sighs, taking in the monotony and meaninglessness of his current situation. No war. No life or death. No brotherhood of men protecting and fighting for one another. Just, a job. Work. Grocery shopping. Cereal. A lower middle class comfortable enough life. The movie ends with him getting off a plane in the Middle East and returning to his military job. Diffusing live bombs.

All that said, I can greatly relate to him there. Atleast the sentiment or the overarching message or life or feeling being portrayed. The fragility of life really requires you to be diligent and almost paranoid in your effort to survive, but in modernity, survival just really means…make money. If you have an infinite amount of money, your survival is set. You can have private protection for gods sake. The best healthcare. Eat the best foods. Have little stress. Enjoy life. Live how you want. But when you don’t, like most of us, it’s really just a lot of working to make money simply to exist. Sometimes I think if an alien were to examine my life, they would think I was property of the company I work for based on the fact that that is where and how I spend most of my days and the best of my time and energy. It seems kind of like a joke and a massive ILLUSION of freedom. Freedom that I’ll almost never obtain and if/when I do, i’ll be so damn old and tired and on my way out that it’ll feel like a waste. So here we all are, just like Squid Games or Mr Beast Games, all trying, from the jump, to escape the very thing we were born into?! What a trip!

So yea..I get the pull to renounce it all and just live in a place of quiet worship. Call it avoidance, call it escapism, but in a way, I see us all avoiding and escaping our own conditions on a daily basis. Or working so hard to be one of the lucky few who get out of the rat race.