Suspended – I can’t learn from my mistakes, when I review them, it’s just agony.

Romeo – Okay.

Dj – If I could follow your advice, I wouldn’t need to write!

Ali – I love this, good.

David Duff – Thanks!!!! I could pretty much understand this particular passage, but your translation really helped.

The past is important. We really only derive learning from experiences, those of the good and bad kind. Our perspective often becomes more enlightened by looking back at an event as opposed to being present, in it.

I don’t think it’s healthy to hold on to the past but it certainly serves a great purpose. How else can we learn from our mistakes?

Yes you can – but you have to work at it! Not that hard, though, just buy an Arden edition with footnotes to explain the text, and then try reading it *aloud* to yourself. Here is a modern ‘translation’ of his famous soliloquy which more or less sums up your predicament:

” To live, or to die? That is the question.
Is it nobler to suffer through all the terrible things
fate throws at you, or to fight off your troubles,
and, in doing so, end them completely?
To die, to sleep—because that’s all dying is—
and by a sleep I mean an end to all the heartache
and the thousand injuries that we are vulnerable to—
that’s an end to be wished for!
To die, to sleep. To sleep, perhaps to dream—yes,
but there’s there’s the catch. Because the kinds of
dreams that might come in that sleep of death—
after you have left behind your mortal body—
are something to make you anxious.
That’s the consideration that makes us suffer
the calamities of life for so long.
Because who would bear all the trials and tribulations of time—
the oppression of the powerful, the insults from arrogant men,
the pangs of unrequited love, the slowness of justice,
the disrespect of people in office,
and the general abuse of good people by bad—
when you could just settle all your debts
using nothing more than an unsheathed dagger?
Who would bear his burdens, and grunt
and sweat through a tiring life, if they weren’t frightened
of what might happen after death—
that undiscovered country from which no visitor returns,
which we wonder about and which makes us
prefer the troubles we know rather than fly off
to face the ones we don’t? Thus, the fear of
death makes us all cowards, and our natural
willingness to act is made weak by too much thinking.
Actions of great urgency and importance
get thrown off course because of this sort of thinking,
and they cease to be actions at all.

No solution, of course, to your predicament but then ‘old Bill’ wasn’t in the ‘solutions business’, merely the descriptive!

I'm back on my anti-depressant (+never went off mood-stabilizer)and I am truly shell-shocked from the attempt to get off of it. Withdrawals were soooooooooo awful. I had never experienced morbid depression until seratonin withdrawals.

After reading Max's book (endgame) I'm sort of on board with anarcho-primitivism. Ready to let go of the earth and push it toward re-wilding. I'm just going to love my people as much as possible and enjoy pretty colors until I go, or until global warming gets us.

Of course one tries to live in the moment, but that mostly only gives me succour if it involves being in bed, reading with the cat, gardening, or buying luxury red lipsticks.

My advice: be born with all the money.