The point of life is to live, and living isn’t a spectator sport.
Living means taking risks, pursuing your interests, embarrassing yourself, attempting difficult things, setting ambitious goals, trying, failing, and trying again. Living means pushing your mind and body to their limits, just to see what you’re capable of. Living means fighting back against the inertial forces that draw all of us toward the apathetic life. Living means being the protagonist of your own story, not a passenger whose outcomes are at the mercy of their environment.
The irony of modern life is that those of us with the means to really, truly live, who can afford to take risks and strike out on our own and blaze our own paths, are the least likely to do it, because we are seduced by the comforts of the apathetic life, and we don’t have to go above and beyond to make ends meet. So we continue existing, not living, and the clock keeps ticking.
The most dangerous aspect of the apathetic lifestyle is that you don’t notice the time you’re wasting while you spend your days scrolling TikTok or Instagram, firing off the occasional email while absorbing whatever slop the algorithm pushes to your timeline. It’s only 10, 20, and 30 years later, when the time is gone, that you think, “Shit, maybe I should have done more with my life.
— Jack Raines, The Cost of Apathy