Choose Yourself

by James Altucher

A lot of people want to die. And I don’t blame them. The most dreadful thing in life is not dying. It’s being born. Once you are born, you’re screwed. Now you have to actually survive. You have to grow from someone who craps their pants, can’t speak to anyone without crying, and can’t walk or feed themselves, to a full-grown adult who can barely do all of that while also juggling a mortgage, a marriage, kids, career, whatever, to finally being an old man who can’t do any of those baby-like things again. Then you die. No worries after that. How do I know a lot of people want to die? Because Google tells me. The search phrase that is most likely to take people to my blog is, “I want to die.” The number-two search phrase is “I hope to die.” Number three is “How can I disappear,” which is a little more hopeful than dying but expresses no less similar a sentiment (it’s sort of like saying “How can I kill this life I have and start another”). My e-mail is slightly more uplifting. The most popular question I get via e-mail is “I’m stuck. How can I move forward in life?” Each of those last people is not quite at the “I want to die” point, but somehow their lives have stalled. The reason they’re stalled is because the axis of the world has changed. We can’t rely on the job, the marriage, the relationship, the house with the white-picket fence, the college degree, the anything external for that matter. Nothing counts. Everything we dreamed for was an illusion. So people find themsel...