Yesterday I finally saw The Secret, and I started thinking about my life and how I got to where I am today. Then I thought -- is all this really worth it? Is living worth all the trouble we go through? But then almost instantly I got a response from my subconscious: "wrong question!"
A long time ago, when Steve was running Dexterity Software he wrote some articles. He revamped a few of them and put them on this site, but I think some of them didn't make it. In any case, one of those articles that I think is no longer available had a metaphor that looked at life as a role playing game. Basically the idea was that when you play a game, you usually undertake some dangerous missions. You're not afraid to do that in a game because you know that you're not in any danger; your game character is just a projection of yourself. At the same time you won't be reckless either because your character can still die in the game.
And that's sort of like what Steve suggested we look at ourselves. That we are not our physical bodies, but rather that they are just projections of ourselves in the physical world. I'm paraphrasing very liberally from memory, so Steve if you read this please forgive me if I totally butchered what you wrote.
What I realized from the combination of that article and The Secret is that it really doesn't matter what happens to us in our lifetime. We're eventually going to die anyway, sooner or later. That's the only absolute that exists in our lives. There's no guarantee of what age we'll live to, how rich we'll be, how many friends we'll have, etc., but we're all going to die one day regardless of what we do in our lifetime.
Given that perspective, asking "is life worth living" doesn't make sense because it's simply a stupid question. It's basically like buying a game and then asking "is this worth playing?" It doesn't make any difference in the grand scheme of things if you start playing a game and finish it, or abandon it halfway through. And life in my opinion is the same. You can end your life whenever you want, but in the end it's not going to make any difference to you whether you live as long as is possible or arbitrarily end your life at some point. One day you'll be dead anyway, so why not take advantage of your situation of being alive and do whatever it is you want to do? Why spend time on fear, worry, anger? It's not going to matter in the long run.
Why did I write all this? Mainly because just about everyone I know right now (my family, friends) is living at a pretty low level of awareness, and I'm starting to notice how pointless their preoccupations are. They're worried about trivial, ultimately unimportant things. Your life is going to end eventually, and at that point it won't make any difference whether you've lived your life as a mouse or as a lion. Whether you
lived to 100 or was
fatally shot at 23. So is life worth living? That's a question with an undefined answer, since life is not quantifiable. But while we're alive, we might as well make the most of it and live courageously.