What Constitutes a Wasted Life?

this was a very short post and yet it opens into something extremely complicated; "is there a right way to live?"

thats the million dollar question isnt it, and isnt it also the question that brought us all here to begin with? im keeping this response short as i can so generally speaking i think it has something to do with 1) our potential, and with 2) the courage to face our lives directly.

ive seen people hide from their lives until they died, and i consider those wastes. i hid from my own life for years and am now far behind where i could be if i had stepped up when i should have. i have no hesitation in saying i wasted a lot of time. even though i learned some valuable lessons.

what i think im seeing in this thread is that people are so afraid of being mean or of encouraging meanness that theyre denying reality: obviously a person can throw their life away, but its not nice to tell them that. and you damn sure dont want anyone to tell you that youre wasting yours. is niceness a more important a message to you than the message of personal ownership? the message that we all have the potential to go in any number of directions, and that some of them are better than others? there are all these potential persons that any of us could become in the next 20 years and theres several really good ones that most of us could become if we really work at it consistently. but its a lot of work, and that work takes time, and we've only got a small amount of time.

i consider that a far more important message than "dont worry, be happy"

if you believe in an afterlife then you can believe that the dead person learned a lesson. i admit there may be an afterlife, but i dont count on it, and so i believe the dead person simply died and no longer exists to learn anything. and i do have firsthand experience of people i was close to overdosing and dying. ive held them in my hands. ive saved people from dying of overdose and i have failed to save people from dying of overdose.its weird to remember someone awake last night and dead today and try to think what purpose she could have accomplished in between.
no, those lives were wasted. even they knew it. it might be that i learned a lesson, but that doesnt mean their lives werent thrown away frivolously on some dumb-shit, it means that i (eventually) made the most out of a bad situation. and its not like i really learned the lesson because i still kept living the lifestyle i was living and it was only good luck that i didnt die myself. eventually i did change but ive seen a lot of people die, and a lot go to prison, and that never stopped me from doing what i was doing. when i finally did change, it was because of what i was tired of for my own self, not because of what i saw happen to others. so who learned the lessons?

MartaLina wrote: We know so little of why we are here or what we are supposed to do that i cannot ever begin to think that i have any right whatsoever to call anyones life , a wasted life. So i cannot answer the question because i am not qualified to do so.

well that is fair and true.
im not suggesting anyone claim the moral authority to tell other people that they are wasting their lives, im only suggesting that people take their own personal lives seriously, and treat their own personal time as if it is limited and as if it actually matters how its used.

not having a purpose (or not claiming ownership for our purpose and being responsible for pursuing it) is often a core theme in wasted lives. theres no 100 percent defense against tragedy or misfortune or the development of self destructive tendencies, but purposelessness makes us vulnerable to all kinds psychological stagnation and distortions, and is an open door to counterproductive behaviors.

maybe one of the things we are doing here at totjo is helping people to find their purpose?
im not about to tell some 19 year old kid that eating boogers in a shack made of sticks and garbage bags in the middle of the woods is equal to being an astronaut and orbiting the earth in a nasa space station.

Rick D wrote: There are no wasted lives; every life has a purpose, and everyone returns to the Force when that purpose has been fulfilled.

i said before, its very strange to see someone alive in the evening and then see them dead in the morning and try to figure out what purpose they fulfilled in the space between the two sightings. im not sure that i can accept this sort of karmic/mechanistic view of life and death.

Rick D wrote: This physical life is but a blink in the eye of eternity and it's only purpose is to teach us what we cannot learn on the other side.

well you have me at kind of an impasse Rick, if you really know what happens after death, i would like very much to discuss it with you. its such an important question and i dont want my incredulity to offend or insult someone who really knows the answer to the point that they dont feel comfortable talking to me about it. but on the other hand, the chances that you do know what happens after death are pretty small. and i mean youre being pretty specific here. youre saying that we can learn while we are alive but we cant learn when we're dead but youre saying it in a way that implies that there is still an "us" on "the other side". i mean its obviosu to me that we cant learn when we're dead, but to me thats because there isnt any "us" left.
the way you posted suggests that youhave some first hand knowledge of what happens after we die. do you have first hand knowledge of what happens to us after death?
or do you simply have opinions and hopes based on rumors?

1) comparing ourselves to others is not always bad. we have to compare ourselves with others in order to learn about ourselves, and to correct ourselves. to give us an idea of what we might be capable of and also of what we dont want to become. the lesson is how to do it without it demolishing us in some way. to develop the courage to pursue our potential and risk failure, and experience failure, without letting the failure destroy us psychologically. to learn and grow from our mistakes.
"to be like the flame of a candle, which, in spite of being up against the light of a billion stars, remains intact, because it never pretended to be more than what it is: a mere candle"

2) if you wasted something by not writing your book it wasnt wasted because others have written better books, it was wasted because you didnt write any. i dont know what that book really meant to you. i used to be enjoy writing stories and poetry and i wanted to write a book at one time too. i came to find out that i dont really care enough about it to make it the kind of day to day priority that a writer has to, and its one of those things ive let go of.

you could have come to realize the same thing that i did, that it wasnt really that important to you. if that had happened it wouldnt be bothering you now.

or you could have accepted that being an author was a part of your purpose and that it was important to you no matter how it compared to others. that experience alone, however it ended, is a meaningful thing to do.

you could have written a book that was pretty terrible but at least it was your book, you could have decided that even hemmingway probably wrote at least one piece of shit story in his life and that the most important thing is just to dedicate yourself to your craft, because that craft is part of who you are as a person and its something important to you.

what you seem to be describing is that you got intimidated by the stars and lost faith in your own flame.
thats exactly the sort of thing that leads to a wasted life. so what are you doing now, working at Big Lots? the manager at Wal-Mart or tech-support at a call center somewhere?
is what youre doing now better than being a writer?
not to demean what you are doing now, im sure it serves useful and worthy purposes, but would you rather do whatever it is that youre doing AND ALSO write your book?

what if you wrote something and realized that its just not in you to be a writer? well thats bullshit lol. even a bad writer is still a writer! and we get better at things by doing the things.
i have a passion and maybe i will never be the worlds very greatest at it, but im already better than all those billions of people who never even started doing it to begin with and im getting to the point where i can make modest income by doing it. but i dont do it to be better than everyone else, i do it because its important to me to do it. because i love it. i do it for its own sake.

but suppose you did write the book and suppose it was bad and suppose that you had to accept that its not in the cards for you to be the next hemmingway.
well that is a hard thing to experience. i dont blame you for wanting to avoid it. but if you really want to write then writing is a part of who are you are. thats not going away. that part of you can be starved and ignored (to your detriment) but your fear of not being good enough it is keeping you from doing something that is actually important to your being. maybe your stories wont be compelling to other people (but maybe they will, youre a smart guy) but do you believe it helps you more to hide from your fears indefinitely or to find a way to face them?