A Boethian Apocalypse.

I have always wanted to live the perfect day. Every night when I go to bed, I think about all the decisions I made and how a different permutation of decisions may have made my day much better (or worse). To put it in painfully simplified terms, I wish my life played out like a fucking Choose Your Own Adventure book. As belittling as that sounds, it’s mostly true.

Take just the last 24 hours of your life, for instance. You could have started looking for a new job to quit the one you hate, confessed your undying love to the object of your affection, or started to break a bad habit. Every second of the day is really just another iteration in the chaos theory of life and in the last 3 seconds I probably just sent everything in the wrong direction and fucked up by day. We’ll never know. What I do know, however; is that I have never and probably will never win a Choose Your Own Adventure book on the first reading. There’s always the notion of the winning combination, but never the belief that you’re going to guess it out of thin air.

I’ve heard the phrase “I live my life without regrets” from far too many oblivious and naïve people. I would love to meet a person who wholeheartedly embodies this mantra just so I could relentlessly pester them into admitting that they regretted doing something. Does anyone really live for a few hours without thinking of something they should or shouldn’t have done? If I failed to help them find something they regretted, they would sure as hell regret meeting me at least. By the end of my lifetime, I hope to have done 27 things that I didn’t regret, but I fear this goal is far too ambitious.

My inability to fathom living a regret-less life probably stems from my pseudo-destructive over-analysis of every aspect of my life. (As I write this, irrational fears about the previous sentence being too wordy materialize). This is why I will never gather the conviction to get a tattoo. I can almost guarantee you I would find a reason to hate it within a year and would spend quadruple the amount I got it for to get it removed (The removal process, of course, wouldn’t fully erase and I would be condemned to a life as an indecisive Hester Prynne). Being the fatal person I am, I am almost certain that my mind is programmed to search for flaws. This proves to be supremely disastrous when you are also a perfectionist. How can one live this mythical perfect day when one also spends half their day trying to figure out what has already gone wrong? I am now beginning to regret expressing my desires to even conceive the idea of a perfect day.

I really do think Groundhog Day is one of the most depressing movies ever. Great, Bill Murray figured out the way to live that day just the right way so that everything worked out. This took him 4372 tries (an approximate figure). Now, imagine if tomorrow you woke up and had to the chance to live a day over again. I’ve let so many people slip through my life and permitted so many indecisions to stagnate my boring existence to count, and if given the chance, would should sure as hell attempt to combat the passivity and pursue something other than just getting to the next day. Of course, this couldn’t all be fixed in one day—I know I would probably overzealously screw up my day right from the get-go in an act of overcompensation and want to try again but probably wouldn’t get the chance.

Lou Reed thinks the perfect day involves drinking Sangria in a park and going home or going to the zoo and then the movies. While Lou Reed is an extremely talented artist and this song helped establish his solo career post Velvet Underground, it also makes him sort of an idealistic idiot. I do not care how much you love spending the day with the person you love, but days as simplistic as the ones you describe staunchly contrast with the definition of ‘perfect.” If a day at the zoo is the best you can do Lou Reed, I fear you may have spent your faux-perfect day with the wrong person.

Traditional rhetoric suggests “every day is a new day.” This is true (in its most basic form), but the fact that said day is “new” also suggests that it is no more familiar to you than the previous day when you woke up. Tomorrow, I will wake up knowing I am going to work from eight to five. This is not new at all. I know what I will do tomorrow, save for a few details. I suppose tomorrow will be technically ‘new,’ but it won’t feel like it.

It appears the only way to be completely satisfied with life is to pretend. You can either:
a) obliviously declare that you would change nothing about your life
b) self-servingly cower behind empty mantras
c) somehow live every day 4372 times (again, an approximate figure) or until you get it right, which ever comes first.

Unfortunately for me, I am none of the above. The perfect day I have mythologized so ardently in the last paragraphs will never show itself. Perhaps I will go to bed believing I played everything just right, but I will wake up the next day only to find the proverbial fly in the ambrosial ointment. Philosophy offers no consolation.