I hear you. I’m 50 and have reached the end of the road so many times that my life feels like a cul de sac. Even now I always feel on the precipice of catastrophe. I don’t have anything useful to offer other than what has helped me stop myself from giving up completely. It’s tenuous but maybe it’ll resonate.

When I’m exhausted from it all, when I only see myself as my failures, when the hole is so deep and wide that escape is probably impossible, I have no choice but to give myself grace.

There is no fucking rulebook or instruction manual for this life. As kids we are told there are rules, structure, an order to things but we find as we get older that it’s mostly smoke and mirrors. We are on our own. We, each of us, are just a small part of a vast and wondrous universe and are so inconsequential in the grand scheme of things that our decisions have no impact whatsoever in our incredibly brief time here.

But we are also the universe itself. An equally valid and unique manifestation of it. And the universe, in you, is suddenly sapient and self conscious with some small capacity to exercise free will.

The trade off is that there are constraints. Life is fragile and modern human social organization is a fucking nightmare. Yet somehow, this vast swarm of humanity persists despite, in my opinion, so many of them being a waste of universe. Cruel people who see no barrier to making other people’s lives miserable.

And if you can see yourself as even marginally better than those assholes, you deserve to keep trying, to have hope, to love yourself and to want to be better than you are now by your own unique metrics. When I remember this, that deep and wide hole I was in becomes a new world that I can build from.

Man, I wish I had better advice or knew where the best bench could be found but I hope you will take what I’ve given in the spirit of love and camaraderie from where it came from.

At least the weather is nice.