Do People Actually Think Life Is Worth Living, Anyway?
I got a flat tire on the way to pick up my asthma prescription last week. It was 82 degrees, the kind of humid that makes your shirt stick to your back within two minutes of standing still, and my phone was at 11% because I forgot to plug it in the night before. I pulled over onto the shoulder of the road that runs between two cornfields, leaned my head against the steering wheel, and waited for AAA. That’s when this beat-up blue Ford F-150 pulled over behind me, and an old guy with a white beard and a pit bull hanging out the passenger window got out.
He offered to change the tire for me, I said AAA was already on the way, so we just stood there swatting mosquitoes and making small talk about how the corn looked good this year. Then out of nowhere I just blurted it: “Do you ever wonder if people really find life worth living?” I immediately wanted to shove the words back in my mouth. We’re just two strangers killing time, I don’t even know his name, and I’m hitting him with the big existential question out of nowhere. I started apologizing, said I didn’t know why I said it, it’s just been bouncing around my head for months.
He just scratched the back of his neck, the pit bull pulled away to chase a squirrel into the corn, and he said, “Hell, I don’t think about it that much. If I thought about it every day, I’d probably sit on my porch and drink all day. My garden got blight this year, all my tomatoes rotted before they even turned red. My knee hurts so bad I can’t go deer hunting anymore, which is the only thing I ever really liked doing. My wife left me 11 years ago, and I still buy two gallons of milk every week because I forget it’s just me now. Wastes half of it every time. But… I got that dog. He steals my socks and hides them under the couch. And the sun sets over those cornfields right there pretty much every single night. Ain’t nothing that special about it, but it’s there. I guess it’s worth it enough.”
That answer stuck with me, more than any TED Talk or Instagram caption I’ve ever seen about how life is a precious gift. Ever since my friend Lila killed herself last year, when she was 31, that question’s been sitting in the back of my throat, like I swallowed a marble I can’t cough up. After she died, everyone posted all these soft, sad posts about how precious life is, how we have to hold on, how it’s all worth it. But I knew Lila. I knew how she’d lie awake for three nights in a row with her chronic pelvic pain, how she hated the marketing job she went $10,000 into debt for, how she said most days felt like treading water in a pool that’s slowly draining. She didn’t think it was worth it, and that doesn’t make her wrong, and it doesn’t make everyone else wrong either.
I work part-time checkout at the grocery store downtown, so I see all kinds of people every week. Last Tuesday, I had a young mom come through, her 4-year-old was having a full-on meltdown because she wouldn’t buy him the sugary dinosaur cereal, he was throwing boxes off the endcap and screaming so loud the whole store turned to look. She was red in the face, apologizing to me, she looked like she was about to cry too. But when no one was looking, she snuck him a lollipop from behind the counter, and when he grinned, her whole face softened. That same day, an old guy named Joe comes in every Saturday at 10:15, buys one single red rose and a $1 lottery ticket. I rang him up once and asked what the occasion was, and he said it’s for his wife’s grave. He’s been doing it every week for 14 years, ever since she died of breast cancer. I asked him if it ever gets less heavy, and he said no. But if he didn’t do it, what else would he do with his Saturday mornings? Watch reruns all day? This gets him out of the house.
I’m just as guilty of lying about it as everyone else. Last month I went to a family cookout, my aunt asked me how work was going, how my apartment was, I smiled and said everything’s great, can’t complain. But three hours before that, I was sitting on my bathroom floor crying because my cat peed on my favorite vintage sweater I got from my mom before she moved across the country, and my washer broke, and I couldn’t afford to fix it for two more weeks. That’s just how we do it, right? We pretend we’ve got it all figured out, that we’re out here thriving, that we definitely think life is 100% worth living all the time.
Some days I do. Some days I sit on my fire escape after work, drink a cheap canned beer, watch the fireflies blink in the alley, my cat curls up on my foot, and the kid next door plays Taylor Swift on his acoustic guitar off key, and it’s just… nice. It’s not perfect, it’s not some big grand moment that makes me want to shout from the rooftops that life is amazing. It’s just nice. And those are the days I think yeah, this is why it’s worth it. But some days I spill coffee on my laptop, lose three weeks of editing work for that side gig I’m doing, my best friend bails on our dinner plans because she got a last minute invite to a work thing with her new boss, I eat cold leftover pizza for dinner and stare at the wall for three hours, and I think, what’s the point of all this anyway?
I don’t have a clean answer. I don’t think anyone does. That old guy in the pickup didn’t have a perfect answer, just a messy, honest one. He didn’t say it’s all worth it because of the big promotions or the dream vacations or the perfect family. He said it’s worth it enough because of the dog and the sunset. I think that’s as good as it gets. You don’t have to feel like life is worth living every single day. You don’t have to pretend that all the bad stuff is just a lesson, or that it makes you stronger, or whatever. Some days it’s just garbage. Some days it’s soft and nice. Most days it’s a weird mix of both, and you just get up and go to work and feed the cat and buy the milk even if you don’t need it, and that’s enough. That’s all anyone’s really doing, anyway.
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