What's The Rush?

I tend to vacillate between a) pretending that nothing really matters because our existence, no matter how highly evolved we like to tell ourselves we are, is essentially a meaningless and arbitrary journey through a course fraught with obstacles both external and self-made in which we think we are choosing our own direction when in reality we are being pushed along by a collection of chemicals whose only goal is to spread their own ingredients regardless of the damage it does to their current host and b) cowering in the corner when confronted by the certainty that there's no actual need to pretend, because it's all true. In those bleak moments of awareness the most frightening thing to consider, apart from the almost unbearable solitude that no amount of excess can ever fully alleviate, is not that the future will bring with it some kind of chaotic change but that it will essentially be pretty much the same as it is now, except more humid. This is the best it's going to be, and that's way worse than what you thought was intolerable even a year ago. It doesn't much help to learn that the universe is even older than previously projected, and expanding more slowly than earlier estimates had assumed. So it looks like we're going to be here for a while. Nobody will blame you if you decide that you might as well take another shot at getting through 'Infinite Jest' or 'House of Cards.'