Want for nothing. If you want for nothing, if you can throw out everything you own that isn’t absolutely essential to your survival, then every meal is a banquet. Every cup of coffee a special occasion.

Accept that you are dying. You’re falling apart, slowly, right where you sit. It’s just a question of when. Start listening to people. Under all of their inane bullshit you will hear, very softly, the same fear and uncertainty that you have about that sudden stop at the end.

Chances are, your heart will give out. You’ll feel a sudden pain, and BAM! You’re on your back, pumping that last pint through. You will have a brief moment of clarity. Your life will flash before your eyes: All of the things you wish you’d done, interspersed with all the fucking TV you watched.

Alternately, you’ll go out slowly, rotting of cancer. Malignant neoplasms. Eating pills and getting shot up with chemicals that kill the tumors and every other living cell they touch. You’ll watch more TV, but you won’t enjoy it. Everything hurts too much, and you’ll wish that you could sit outside just one more time without being too stoned on medication to enjoy it.

A few of you might punch your own ticket – pop yourself in the head, or step off a chair at the end of a short rope, or chase a bottle of pills with a tall glass of vodka – but probably not. After a completely un-lived life, people tend to linger. You’ll get to watch your family grow resentful and divide up your possessions.

You’ll think about that stupid vacation to Florida – the one where you sat by the pool with a cocktail and did nothing – because you can’t remember the last time you built something or wrote something or did something.

At your funeral, no one is going to talk about your nifty laptop or your top end speakers. The only one who cares about your HDTV is the person who gets to keep it. Nobody is going to talk about that brand new Commuter Appliance you drove, or any of the shit in your kitchen.

No one will mention your paycheck.

They will remember every lie you ever told.

Accept that this will happen to you . . . Unless you choose different. You will die like this because you choose to die like this. Don’t pretend it won’t happen to you. Don’t let it happen to you.

Live the way you want to be remembered.

Caesar wept at the foot of Alexander’s statue.