IT’S GUEST BLOGGER FRIDAY! TODAY’S QUESTION WILL BE ANSWERED BY JEFFREY BEAUMONT, A FREELANCE CULTURE WRITER AND PHOTOGRAPHER (WHO OTHERWISE PLANS GLOBAL EVENTS FOR MEDIA EXECUTIVES FOR A LIVING). AN UPBEAT BUT ANXIOUS PERSON BY NATURE, HE CONQUERED A SEEMINGLY CRUSHING AND LIFE-LONG WELTSCHMERZ ONCE AND FOR ALL BY DEDICATING SIX MONTHS OF HIS LIFE IN 2008 TO A PROJECT CALLED HYPERLIVING, WHICH ENTAILED DOING ONE UNIQUE ACTIVITY EVERY DAY FOR A WEEK, EACH WEEK, AND DETAILED SLAVISHLY ON A BLOG OF SAME NAME. (THE HYPERLIVING MANIFESTO, BTW, CAN BE FOUND HERE). THESE DAYS, YOU CAN CHECK OUT HIS MUSINGS ON CULTURE, MUSIC AND SPORTS AT SLANGEDITORIAL.NET. JEFFREY WAKES UP EACH MORNING REMINDING HIMSELF THAT HE LIVES BY THE CREDO: “I AM A MAN DESTINED TO LEARN BY CRUEL EXPERIENCE.” DO NOT TAKE HIS ADVICE FOR ANY REASON.
I won’t beat around the bush on this one: There is absolutely no question that I would trade a year of my life for a million dollars. A few reasons why:
1) I consider myself a life-living maximalist, but also one for whom the pendulum has constantly swung back and forth between feeling satisfied and depressed. In my limited 28 years of experience, the one thing I have identified for myself as being paramount to living right is to be able to maintain a high quality of life, and to have the agency to live that life to the fullest. One million dollars, at this point, would go a long way toward giving me the agency to open up a great range of possibilities that I feel are already at my disposal but which I can’t right now quite attain.
2) I am a man who, by most accounts, lives life by “burning the candle at both ends.” I sleep three to five hours a night, I try to do as many things as possible with my day, and tend to rest only when I’m no longer able to stay awake. I do not spend much time sitting around reflecting on what I might not do with my tomorrow. For these reasons, I’m fairly convinced that I’m either going to live a long time or that I will die — maybe accidentally — quite young. Either way though, whenever I go, it’s going to be because I gave everything and this was how it’s meant to be.
I’ve often heard people harp on the idea that they’d “rather be dead than old.” While I think I could get behind that idea, in this specific case, my desire to take the money and run has much more to do with living right and in the moment and not worrying about what happens later.
I imagine that even within the silly confines of this game, accepting the money will not require some ominous pre-death meeting with The Grim Reaper whereby I’m reminded that I will lose a year starting at some certain point. When I die, I’ll be just be dead.
Therefore, taking this deal is a NO BRAINER, because I’ll never have any way of knowing what I might have “lost.” It’s just, in the words of Jay-Z, “poof —vamoose, son of a bitch.” And prior to dying, I’ll have used those dollars to gear up my life-force possibilities and make sure I continue living each day to the fucking max. HOLLA! This shit is really too easy.
- Jeffrey B.
I’ve been listening to suicide-note songs all morning (Palace Brothers, Elliott Smith, El Perro del Mar, Red House Painters, Chris Bell…you get the drift) to counter all the drunk chanting/yelling/drunkening coming from the parade outside my window, so I’m actually pretty in the mood to do some life shortening. (I don’t hate the Yankees and I don’t hate parades, but I do hate how they combine to make it harder to get to an office job I don’t particularly want to go to in the first place.) The answer to this one probably depends on the day and the mood for me, but at this moment, it is a yes. If family history means anything, I’ve got a good chance of making it to my 90s, which sounds just exhausting. You give me $1M, I give you 365 days. Sounds fair enough. Happy Friday.
- Kali
