Fact Check Me: Maybe We Don't Admire Degenerates
I've been trying to figure something out.
Lately I've been drawn to degenerate characters in fiction.
Not because I want their lives.
Quite the opposite.
I'm about as straight-laced as they come. You won't find me drinking until I black out, gambling away my paycheck, or waking up on someone's couch wondering how I got there.
That sounds exhausting.
So why do I keep coming back to these characters?
At first I thought maybe I admired that they didn't give a damn.
But that wasn't quite it.
Because most of them do give a damn.
They're lonely.
They're broken.
They're angry.
They're carrying wounds that never healed.
No one envies that.
Then it hit me.
Maybe we don't admire the degenerate.
Maybe we admire the part of them that stopped performing.
They aren't chasing promotions, polishing résumés, building a personal brand, or measuring themselves against everyone around them.
For better or worse, they've stopped trying to become someone.
Somewhere along the way, I realized I'd spent much of my own life trying to be something.
A good father.
A good teacher.
A good husband.
A successful business owner.
A respected martial artist.
None of those are bad ambitions. In fact, I'm proud of them.
But I spent so much time trying to become someone that I never stopped to ask what it meant to simply be.
Maybe that's what these characters reveal.
Not because they drink.
Not because they gamble.
Not because they're disasters.
But because, beneath all the wreckage, they seem strangely unencumbered.
Of course, fiction cheats.
If the same character got up every morning, paid his phone bill on time, did his laundry every Wednesday, made himself a coffee, read a book, and quietly enjoyed his life, we'd probably call him boring.
So writers make him a drunk.
They make him reckless.
They give him addictions, broken relationships, and spectacular failures because chaos makes better stories than contentment.
Maybe we've mistaken the packaging for the message.
We think we envy the bottle.
Maybe we envy the weight they no longer seem to carry.
The challenge isn't to become the degenerate.
The challenge is to learn how to stop performing without destroying your life in the process.
Maybe that's the real work of the second half of life.
I spent the first half trying to be something.
Maybe the second half is about finally learning how to just be.
Fact check me.