Being Guilty of Taking the Free Ride.

I’m developing the sense that I’m guilty of not paying my subscription for the privilege of being alive. I don’t connect and play the game as a team player. I don’t join in with people and their systems as devised by all those influential beings and agencies, current and historical, which set out the playing field and wrote the rules of the game. It’s now suggesting to me that I should feel inadequate.

‘Ah,’ you might ask, ‘but who does pay a subscription? The rest of your human co-habitees in this environment called life rarely do anything other than take whatever they can grab – the pleasures, the accomplishments, the praise, the benefits of wealth, and so on. The vast majority of people take whatever they can get and never give anything of themselves in return.’

I’m sure that’s largely true, but that’s not my business. I can only be responsible for me, and I’m not satisfied that I’m doing enough. In fact, I don’t seem to be doing anything at all. And there are exceptions to the general point, of course, people who live lives in the service of mankind as we all know.

It was brought home to me when I read of some celebrity dying in Buenos Aries yesterday, and seeing feature after feature heaping plaudits on his name. I’d never heard of him because I’m not the sort to live life gorging on cultural candyfloss as we’re supposed to do. So should I feel guilty? I suppose not.

But I was interested to hear what a psychologist said on YouTube last night. She said: ‘INFJs are born with the need to make the world a better place. If they fail to do that – or believe they’ve failed – they can become deeply unhappy.’ That would appear to sum up my problem.

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When I was eating my lunch today I felt a sharp pain in the upper part of my jaw on one side. It’s still with me and takes the form of a dull, persistent ache rising to some seriously unpleasant pain if I chew anything.

OK then, maybe that’s the answer. Maybe I should stop eating and rid the world of a ne’er-do-well. I don’t fancy it, though. Dying of starvation might be some sort of recompense for being a waste of space, but I wouldn’t enjoy it. Back to square one.

(I'm not at all sure why I wrote that.)