By 
I won’t try to convince you that the drought is a real problem, because well, I can’t. I’m an idiot. I couldn’t even really explain to you why the earth is round, or that the moon is real. My evidence for these things is, “Fuck, I don’t know. People with glasses tell me.”
If I had to actually try to explain the drought to someone, my brain would likely catch fire, and from what I can understand, by law, we’d only be able to use like two cups of water to put the fire out every six weeks. So I won’t try that.
But I do understand the following: water is important. It’s more important than any one food, or fuel. It’s way more important than love. It’s one of two things that we literally need in order to survive.
But because it’s free from any faucet, we treat water like shit. We treat it like the middle child we had to disregard because the newborn baby was born with toenails in his brain.
If you don’t believe me, think about this. Say you were an alien, watching the human race, and you saw us all dying of dehydration, and a lack of fertilized crops, and you thought, “Oh my Gorsplod! This is the hour to make our presence known and help them!”
If you then backed up about ten light years and looked again, and saw them watering golf courses ten years earlier, you’d be like, “Oh never mind. Fuck those people. I hope they die.”
Even if you had your own supply of water ready to bestow to save the human race, you’d withhold it. You’d be like, “Nah fuck ’em. We need this stuff. If we give them our water, they’ll just keep infecting it with Shasta cola syrup, and using it in balloons, and…wait, are they pooping into it?”
It’s natural to not place value on something that you feel entitled to, that costs you nothing, and that’s seemingly limitless. The problem is that we do this with things that aren’t actually limitless, and that are vitally important.This is exactly why we treat the environment like shit–it’s because we’re environmentally spoiled. Right now, not being drowned by oceans, and having bountiful food, and air that doesn’t murder us–that’s all free. We get that just by bursting out of our mothers, and so we assume we’ll always have it regardless of what we do. It’s really hard to give a shit about the environment when you walk outside every day and are like, “Nah, this is fine.” You feel like you can live carefree with no consequences.But of course, there may be consequences, like you know, murdering your grandchildren. So we need to consciously and purposefully fight our instinct to tend towards indifference, and not just with this hippie shit I’ve talked about it. We need to train ourselves to prioritize things not by financial cost, but by actual importance, because pretty much all of life’s most important things are free.
This starts with valuing each other.You ever notice how when your perpetually late friend gets a prostitute, suddenly he’s Mr. Punctual with her?
Okay, neither have I. But I’m betting that’s true, because at least in non-hooker scenarios, people are free, and as a result, we often treat them like garbage. After all, it costs zero dollars to fall out of touch with people we claim are important to us, or to avoid texting people back until it’s the least boring option, or to not call our mothers enough. So why not do it?
And besides, having stimulating and loving people around us all the time is a given, right?
Well, it was when we were kids. Making friends was easy back then, and many of us lived with families that loved us unconditionally, and so we never had to work for these things.
And so now, a lot of us don’t. This is a big problem because as adults, making friends becomes harder and weirder, and we’re no longer constantly surrounded by parents and siblings.
And yet, many of us still feel entitled to have the human race on call for love, stimulation and fulfillment, and we become frustrated and even more painfully alone when this doesn’t happen. We find ourselves with no shoulders to cry on, and no one to play X-Box with except for that fucking asshole in Korea with anime as his profile picture who destroys you every God damn time.
Next thing you know, KimSung69420 is the closest thing you have to a friend, because when you value people less than you should, they value you less, and friendships eventually weaken and end this way.
But ugh! Being there for someone is so much more taxing than scrolling through Instagram! You have to invest time and energy to make relationships work and to connect sufficiently to stimulate each other, and like bleh, who wants to do all that shit when you have Twitter and titties in your pocket?
It’s so easy to fall into that thought pattern, but you should avoid it, because the right people are the best investment you can make. They’re completely free, and they’re the very best sounding boards, entertainers, shoulders to cry on, and sources of you not feeling like a lunatic in a padded cell.
So act as if you’re about to lose everyone. Treat your friends like you just screwed them over and want to make it up to them, treat your mother like she’s on her deathbed, and treat your girlfriend like she just found you at a men’s bathhouse doing God-knows-what with a cucumber and a noose. Desperately try to hold onto people, because the right ones are completely worth the effort.
And as much as you grow to value them, grow to value yourself even more, because you might not be doing that right now.
Our bodies spoil us. Staying alive is super easy. It really wasn’t worth its own song. For most of our lives, it’s simple: find some food somewhere, and avoid walking in front of buses, and you’re good. And as easy as it is to live, it’s just that easy to take life for granted, and so that’s just what we do.
We eat garbage and do no self-maintenance until our bodies fall into disrepair like an old crackhouse. We spend days doing the same shit over and over that we’ll never remember. We don’t go for what we actually want, and we don’t risk things that don’t even really matter. We play it safe, stay boring, try desperately to get out of this existence alive, and all of us fail miserably at it.
We willingly drive into a fog, and then we just kind of sit there and stare at the fog, until our years of fog-staring are finally mercifully ended by an unseeable oncoming big rig.
This happens because on some level, stupid as it is, we assume life will always be there. Subconsciously, we assume that we’ll always have more water, more food, and more life.
But step back, and remember that you fucking won’t. If you need help remembering, think of those stupid memes you see that talk about, “Oh my God! Kids who were born in 1998 just graduated high school!” And instead of being like, “WOW DERR.” Stare at yourself very closely in the mirror, and strangle yourself and say, “YES, EXACTLY! THAT’S HOW LIFE WORKS, IDIOT! IT PASSES IN A FLASH AND SO YOU NEED TO MAKE IT WORTH LIVING OR RISK MISSING THE WHOLE GOD DAMN THING! WAKE, THE FUCK, UP!”
(Note: This hasn’t worked for me so far, but I have faith that it eventually will).
Because here’s the thing: we really do value life. Whenever we think we might die, we feel genuine fear and we realize how much we want life, and we want it because we understand life’s potential. We know how great it can be.
But every second we’re here is another second we’re not, so need to live with our imminent death in mind all the time.
This doesn’t mean directly changing anything you’re doing. It simply means that when you’re fused with your couch for a third day in a row, you’re acknowledging it. You’re saying, “Okay, this is what I’m choosing to do. This is how I’m choosing to spend these heartbeats.”
This is how we have to treat all of these incredibly important things. We need to treat life, and everything here, like it’s always in drought. Treat it all like you won’t always have it, and like it should be conserved, and cherished—and not just something during which you’re supposed to breath, pump blood, and scroll blankly through.
Not only will this help us conserve our resources, but it will help us cherish them more. It will help us be less spoiled and expect less. And when you expect less, you appreciate more, and when you appreciate more, it takes less to make you happy.
When you think about it, the best, and most important things in life really are free. So please, I implore you, stop pooping on them.
