Josh Barnett: Death is a Good Wing Man

Here, I don't want to die. Tomorrow, today, not even five years from now, not ten. Hell, if given the chance, I would fucking live a thousand years if I could, because I think that this world is so fucking amazing that there is... I don't think I could learn all the languages, eat all the foods, even the ones I don't like, see all the mountains, all the architecture, meet all the people, all the cultures, all the fucking everything that exists in this just glorious fucking amazing place. I don't know that... I feel sad that my life can't go on long enough to know these things. And... But I've lived such a life to this point. There are things that... Ten-year-old me would just have just fucking had an aneurysm, thinking that this was ever going to be the way his life turned out, considering what an outcasted, pushed aside, bullied, fucked with, really sort of twisted up, confused young lad, and getting to where I am now, and I can leave this place and die, and my life has been fucking great. I've lived... I'm fulfilled. I live because I want to experience things, I want to create more, I want to do more with my life, but my life has been great enough. It's been great. I've had all the things that I need that are essential in life. That's success. That's real success. Yes. Now, it's hard to find. It is very hard to find, but getting through all the adversity and coming out on the other end better for it. Yeah, I'm more concerned, like in an incident way, I want to die right. I think more about that, or like the stoics, how to... I want to die right. I want to go to Valhalla. I don't want to die a pathetic way from living an epic life. That's more of a concern in terms of death, but otherwise, no, death is there, death is coming, death's alongside me, death's riding in the car with me everywhere I go, and that's fine. He's a good fucking wingman. It's great. Well, there's that energy that comes with death that makes life so exciting. If you were immortal, it'd be like playing God Mode in a video game. It's not exciting. No. Have you ever played God Mode in video games? You know I fucking have. Hey, you had Karmak on here, right? So I fucking played. Doom scared me as a kid when my friend's like, check this shit out. It was like a fucking secret drug deal, like popping the little disks in the library computers. We're like, okay, what's this? It was just... What a freak out. Yeah, I played God Mode in video games. It's terrible because you can't die. For people who don't know what we're talking about, when you play God Mode, you have unlimited ammo and you can't die. Yeah, you can't die. It ruins life. You're invincible. Yeah. It ruins the game. Games are thrilling, but a video game where you're playing in God Mode is terrible. And the reason why is because there's no consequence. There's no risk. Same thing as life. There's no risk. If there's no risk, if there's no struggle, if there's no overcoming. And it's like I always say, like I always say, I have this concept of human entropy, that all humans without proper suffering and overcoming, to use some generic words, obviously from a Nietzschean perspective, you just go to your lowest state of energy. People are... All things in the universe are subject to entropy, and humans are no different. And so obviously we experience entropy and then our bodies break down, and obviously we have cellular degradation and things like that, but we can spiritually degrade. And if we don't have proper overcoming, if we don't have a certain kind of suffering in our life or agitation, we don't grow. Agitation is a great way to put it. Agitation is a great way to put it. And I'm also a big fan of Heidegger, so like being towards death. Knowing that this is inescapable, stop trying to look for anything to alleviate the burden of your own death, and the responsibility of your own creation of an authentic life. Because at the end of the day, you can do all these different fucking things, you can change your mind, you can become this kind of an ideological communist, or you're an alt-right, or you're this, or you're that, you can create all these little things, you can be a Christian or a Catholic or whatever, right? If you're using these things to replace your ownership of authenticity and carrying the burden of your own being in the world, then eventually, regardless of all the shit that you do, when you're laying in bed at night, and you're looking up at that fucking ceiling, you know that you're a fucking fraud, and that you've tried to offload something that you can't get rid of. Yes, yes. 100%. Well put. I tell people don't ever seek comfort, seek clarity and seek improvement. Comfort sucks. Comfort's wack. Comfort's great for a couple hours if you want to chill and watch a movie. But comfort as a lifestyle is bullshit. It's like you're not going to get any improvement. You need to be tested. That term agitation is excellent.