The Meaning of Surviving each Day

Things to do Today:

1. Get up
2. Survive
3. Go back to bed
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Looks easy eh? However, the word SURVIVE has plenty of connotations. Let’s start off with- survive what? For those at work, it could mean surviving bitchy bosses, back-stabbing colleagues, moronic subordinates and our own stupidity and ignorance. For those in school, it’s another day of intellectual bulimia, nagging teachers, stupid classmates and exhausting PE lessons that keep reminding you how fat and unfit you are. Those rotting at home, its having to endure boredom until it is time to go back to bed.

Ok, I’m a very negative person. WK, please don’t nag. Survival to me it’s about surviving the monotony of our daily lives. Come to think of it, I wonder how those old people survive in the old folk’s home.

I feel damn sad when I visit the elderly in the old folk’s homes… I see it as a warning of what is to come as people age. It’s damn depressing when you reach a point in time where ladies can’t find their tits and buttocks, which have sunk beyond sight, and the men can’t “stand” anymore. Your brains have degenerated beyond belief and you smell of piss and shit pretty much permanently. Your friends and loved ones are either dead or dying or they have forgotten about you. It’s just damn depressing. Worse of all, you’ve been abandoned by your family members who either visit you once a week or not at all. You just live for the day or moment that someone will remember and visit you.

I think the monotony of surviving each day is severely amplified for the elderly. For them, death is coming and they live each day waiting for the inevitable to occur. If they have lonely existence, naturally the feelings of abandonment and despair are felt ever more acutely every day. As a matter of fact, there are quite a number of elderly who commit suicide in order to cut short their emotional and psychological suffering.

They survived bringing up children, nasty in-laws, scraps with unscrupulous relatives and friends, only to be abandoned in a “jail” designed for them. It is ironic how the word survival has a different connotation to different people in different contexts.