Dum Vivimus, Vivamus

The title means something like "while we live, let us live" - or, more roughly translated, "while we're alive, let's really live". Obviously, you can tell that this is going to be a post I should, by all rights, regret making - but I'll make it anyway. Not because I'm stupid; not because I don't understand the consequences of my actions (seriously, what harm can come of a little personal blog post?); not because I'm immoral. It's because I want to have a little fun and honesty in a life of duty and lies, and right now I couldn't give a flying fuck about a sense of sacrificing my present for my future; if I do that all my life, what do I end up with? A life wasted on things that brought me no joy, that's what, and no time left to do something that makes me be glad to be alive.

I am in my prime now. I am your equal because I am no more and deserve no less. I am strong, young, sharp. I will not be held back by a failing, rotting system. I will not be held back by you. No, I'll live, really live, and be sane and happy. I'll do what's right: love the creatures around me and work towards a world of more freedom and less suffering. All else is up to me.

I am sick of the morality of repression. I am sick of being told my loves and desires are filthy, impure things, to be hidden away in the back of my head. I am sick of being told my feelings are shameful. I am sick of being told to keep my head down and concentrate on work, because my workload will only increase. I am sick of people telling me that my day will come; my day is today or never. I am sick of people trying to control me and my body. I am sick of them asking me to take personal responsibility, then blame what they don't like about me on others. I am sick of being careful, cautious, meek, submissive. I want to be defiant, foolhardy, helpful, loving, wild...happy. I want to attain eudaimonia, a state of flourishing, and I know I won't find it if I never step out of the boundaries I'm hemmed in by.

You moralists - you people who try to force your ideas on others under the name of decency - have never made me love. You don't unite people, you divide them. You force people into repressing themselves rather than confronting and dealing with what they don't like, and you call those who you don't like a "bad influence". You seek to control others without regard for their welfare - but of course, you'd claim anyone on welfare is a benefit scrounger because you've never thought to examine claims, have you? And of course, in your world if everyone just followed your sick, contradictory, despicable and poorly-thought-out "morality" we'd all be in fucking utopia, wouldn't we?

Well, here's some news for you. We don't live in imaginary bourgeois-repressed-morality world, we live in a reality that is at some level objective and doesn't always do what you want it to do. That's not due to any personal failings or not wishing hard enough for things, it's because this somewhat-objective reality is a bit of a crappy place that will screw you out of the things that give you a reason to keep on living, simply because of things like, say, capitalism. Eudaimonia doesn't fall into your lap at some defined time and place in the future; you have to take it where you can find it, and you have to go beyond the bounds that repression and "decency" will allow you to. The things and people that inspire me to love and really live aren't the repressed, guilty, ashamed people who are sadly full of shit, they're what those repressed, guilty, ashamed people call bad influences.

Those bad influences have kept me sane and alive when nothing else would work. Those bad influences have sparked real love and passion in me. Those bad influences have expanded my mind and made me a better person. And, because of little things like a sense of ethics, I'd do the same for them if ever they needed me. With them at least, I've found a little piece of eudaimonia. I have flourished. I have used my strength wisely. And that, to me, is more important than anything.