Existential Fatigue — thoughts (18)

You don’t choose the life you live, the life you live chooses you.

Anyone can share opinions about life (including yours), but in the end, each person is shaped—deeply—by their reality.

Whatever reality you are faced with will define who you become. That is simply a fact. You don’t truly know you “can’t” be someone else until you have lived their reality to the same depth and intensity.

Your environment (including lineage and ancestry), your suffering and challenges, your moments of abandonment, your privileges or disadvantages, all of these form the core of who you become.

So how can anyone justify envy of another’s greatness, or dismissal of another’s struggle? Until you have lived the exact same life, context, helplessness, and limitations, your judgment is incomplete.

This reflection comes from a constant realization that I did not choose the life I am now living. In many ways, free will feels like an illusion. That does not mean I reject my path, it simply means I feel the weight of it very clearly. At times, the frustration is real, and the fatigue even more so.

When those before you live as they please, without awareness of how their choices echo forward, it becomes inevitable that someone down the line will inherit a life they did not choose. And for that person, there may be no option but to live it, to survive it, because to abandon it would be to undo not only those who came before, but themselves as well.