Why should I wish to live?

[Anacardo]

This is a question that tends to be met with hostility and derision, in my experience; the presumably happy majority seems never to encounter it at all, from cradle to grave, regarding the answer as somehow self-evident. The act of asking seems to mark one as bearing some sort of infectious disease, that people are shy of catching. Nonetheless this is the question that sits before me. My unhappiness has driven me deeper and deeper within myself, and higher and higher into more and more global lines of inquiry, the so-called 'high country of the mind' - what's the point of all this? What's the value in participating?

Some seem to latch onto purpose with vigor early in life; their father's construction company or their childhood sweetheart beckon unsought, and off they are led to their destiny. I have never been like that. In one of my few approving nods to Freud, the pillars of a man's striving are work and love. I seem ill-suited for either; my interests are solitary and specialized - books, music, film, contests of strategy, rhetoric and logic. Counterbalancing that is a lack of practical skill of any kind, self-absorption, a chafing desire for independence and autonomy that eventually brings about conflict in any social setting, and, above all, a profound laziness, which I believe to be the defining element of my character. Even in those pursuits I enjoy I invariably find myself giving less than my best effort; only if there is someone else involved, whom I cannot bear to disappoint, do I find myself fully rising to the occasion. I don't regard this as a particularly sought after set of qualities; I might, to an employer or a mate, be someone that might be settled for in a pinch, but never truly desired. Sometimes I have thought myself on the verge of being proven wrong, or having devised an alternate solution, but always these hopes are proven wrong, and I am left with nothing.

Transcending merit is the issue of desire. I have never had any, beyond idiosyncratic sporting and intellectual pursuits. In my youth, I went to school, as was prescribed to me, and assumed it would sort itself out. Then one day I reached an age when I realized that that wasn't going to happen. I must choose something, but nothing looks particularly appetizing. I loathe subordination, tedium, and business etiquette, and generally dislike having any one else schedule or control my time at all; this already makes me a rather difficult candidate to employ. My current occupation is dying; poker is being choked off in the United States; my skill level is no greater than an average professional's, and that soon will be not enough. My savings are meager and much of them are inaccessible due to the Neteller fiasco. I have no prospects and no desire to simply set my standards lower and drone away at whatever I can get. I am mostly alone in a strange city with my means of support hanging by a thread, with a quicksand-trap inside my head for which therapy and drugs have proven an expensive, time-consuming waste of effort. How am I supposed to look at all this and derive, as a conclusion, that it's best to keep muddling forward somehow?