I know I’m not alone in trying to work out what to do with the years left before discharge day. That being death. For some, it can’t come soon enough.
Hunter S. Thompson wrote: sixty-seven—seventeen more than I needed, seventeen more than I wanted. Shortly after, he blew his brains out with a .44. I personally know others who opted for an early exit. One, a relative, left a note saying he didn’t want to grow old. He was seventy-four, a multi-millionaire, but could find no reason to endure old age.
That, I think, is the hardest thing: the apparent absence of a reason to exist any longer. Nothing left to look forward to. It’s subjective. For some, towing a box around the country is the reward for a lifetime of work and loyalty to family and nation. For others, it’s not. I’m no multi-millionaire, but I understand my relative’s question. Is there any reason to continue?
The answer depends on what you believed life was about in the first place. Yourself and your happiness? Or yourself as an expendable cog in something larger? The latter is hard to accept after decades of individualism hammered into us by advertising, self-help, and new-age fluff promising peace through self-focus and the careful management of desire. It borders on narcissism to believe oneself the reason the universe exists.
Desire is not the problem. Desire for the betterment of others is what gives life weight. This is why old age can be so brutal. People work their entire lives to acquire wealth and status, only to discover—too late—that these things are meaningless in the areas of existence that actually matter.
I once saw an interview on Australian television with Lee Stringer, who spent twelve years as a crack addict living under a platform at Grand Central Station in New York. He said he felt irritated when people congratulated him on his later success—fame, money, a big house. He said people addicted to money and fame were no different from him smoking crack under a railway platform. His success, he said, was becoming the writer he was meant to be.
The interviewer asked what he would say to his teenage self if he could go back in time. Stringer didn’t hesitate. He said he wouldn’t tell him anything, because if even one detail of his life had changed, he would not have become what he was destined to become: a published author.
Success, in other words, is self-realisation.
When I was nineteen, working on my Ducati in my parents’ garage, a friend of my father—staying with us at the time—came down to talk. He was a vice-president of an American multinational, about as close to corporate success as one can get. After a few minutes of talking motorbikes, he said he felt he had failed in life. What he really wanted, he said, was to be an art critic—a cultural educator. Marriage and family expectations had pushed him into business instead. Art remained a dream.
I carried that conversation for decades. Now, old myself, I think he was wrong. He did what he had to do when he became a father. That was a stage of his life. Had he turned to art and criticism later, he would have brought a depth of lived experience no twenty-two-year-old fresh out of university could match. Stringer was right: don’t regret your life. Musashi wrote, never regret what you have done in the past.
Self-realisation doesn’t have an expiry date. Sometimes it happens late, when we finally take our place in the machinery of life as we were meant to. Everything that came before was preparation. Often it isn’t dramatic. It’s accumulated knowledge offered to the one person who needs it at that exact moment. That’s what older people do best: be present, be available, and learn to listen before speaking.
And whether they admit it or not, young people need that now.
I recently restored a few posts I’d deleted. Even as imperfect as they are, they might be useful to someone. I often want to clock off, to leave everything to the younger generations, but something in me refuses. There’s still work to do. We’re facing unprecedented challenges, and every contribution—no matter how small—counts.
That, at least for now, is reason enough to stay.