10.31.2013

More Truth from Alex Balk

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. In my opinion, there's no better person writing about regret and the general malaise and ennui of life on the internet than Alex Balk, over at The Awl. He hit me with another one this morning:

"Maybe the best bit about life—and I am setting an admittedly low bar here, but look what we have to deal with—is that although we are always tempted to pinpoint specific instances where the decisions we made had irrevocable effects on our trajectory from that moment forward, if we are honest with ourselves we can admit that, for the most part, we were going to wind up exactly where we did no matter what. We are who we are and the choices we make are the results of those immutable traits that add up to the person who, for better or worse and usually worse, stares back at us in the mirror each morning with a mixture of pity and astonishment. If we could turn back time we would mostly make the same mistakes, maybe at different moments but always moving us in the same direction. You've fucked up your life through an accretion of small details, not by one or two enormous errors. It is pointless to pine for a do-over; you would just do it over badly. That is who you are and at some point you will have to make peace with it." - Alex Balk making a long winded point about how it's Daylight Savings time this Sunday, November 3rd at 3 am.