5.55 AM

“C’mon, why am I not asleep yet?” you ask yourself. You can see your wife sleeping peacefully beside you; you’ve been staring at the ceiling for hours.

Now what.

You hate work, but you gotta work; your boss is a dick, but you gotta swallow it. “After all, I got mortgage to pay and mouths to feed,” you always say. Sometimes you wonder why your life is the way it is, but you quickly brush it aside; when you were young, you felt like a conqueror, but now, you’ve accepted your eternal slavery.

Since you were a small child, you were forced to follow rules—“do this, then do that; you should get this, then get that.” There wasn’t even a single person in your life that didn’t tell you what to do—your parents, your aunts, your uncles, your spiritual figures, your neighbors, your parents’ friends, and even your parents’ friends’ friends. “Well, since these adults are telling me what to do, they must know what they’re talking about, right?” you innocently said. You did the schools, you did the cubicles; you did the this, you did the that; you chased things you were told to chase, and avoided things you were told to avoid. You sacrificed your own personal happiness to satisfy all the rules that were shoved down your throat, and this life is what you get? There’s maybe a decade left for you to live—two, at most. Now what.

“Honey, can’t sleep again?” your wife whispers in your ear.

“Yeah.”

It’s 5.55 AM.

“Ugh… I guess I’ll take a jog,” you say to her.

July 29, 2021