This year I've learned some important lessons the hard way. May they find their use in the years to come.
This year I've died a little; and I've replaced some of the remaining rot with the results of a slight change in trajectory. I've learned how to let go of the irrelevant and thus to feel more than a decade younger and stronger.
This year I've also learned for the nth time that life is a short warm moment and death is a long cold rest. That entropy, despite, or rather because of its being the most fundamental enemy of life, is worth fighting to the last breath. Not sure that anything else is worth more, despite, or rather because of the slim chances.
This year I've seen more hospital rooms than in all my previous years combined. This year I've loved and I've hated more intensely than in all my previous years combined. This year has been the most horrible, and in its dreadfulness, the most beautiful year in my existence thus far.
Good fucking riddance, 2022.
Yeah.. 2022 was a shitload of fuck.
Might be spoiling the pathos here a little, but... A number of years ago I myself had an episode of being-hooked-up-to-the-machine-that-goes-ping. And I said to meself in me best Pacino brogue, things will be different from now on, there will be no more pills, no more bad food, no more destroyers of my body. Around the same time, I knew a narcissist? sociopath? bad person? who got into a near-fatal car wreck and seemed to finally realize that being an asshole to everyone leaves you all alone when inevitably lady Death comes'a'knockin'...
It didn't last. As the biblical dog returneth to its vomit, so too did the sociopath return to sociopathy, and I returned to, well, this.
Inertia is one HELLUVA drug. Lesson I learned, only way you can really change is by using the temporary, all too temporary, energy of that shock to lock yourself into a set of hopefully better habits and lose the key.
For what it's worth, I don't think you're spoiling the pathos, au contraire. Your observation, as painful and as close to home as it hits, ties perfectly into that discussion about free will.
There's really two alternatives I see here: either one has free will, and then he or she can (willfully) change their habits, despite all environmental pressures that may lurk around the corner, or otherwise one doesn't possess it and then he or she is no better than all the chatbots we deride now and then. Either you possess an agency that is yours or you don't; either you do the right thing or you don't, regardless of what you think you "like" or not, regardless of (mis)perceived options you may think you have or how bad they feel; either you're capable of learning from mistakes or you're not; there's no third alternative on the table, certainly not the kind where you get to be "și cu pula-n cur și cu sufletu-n rai". Some may object that this is too simplistic a view of the problem, but regardless of whether it is or not: it's certainly no one else's responsibility to help you overcome the hurdles that keep you from doing the best thing for yourself. Though you're certainly lucky if you stumble upon that certain someone who'll lend a hand.
Having said that, I agree that it takes a whole lot of energy to educate oneself and it's more difficult to gather that energy as one gets older. But that's always been the case when it came to education and we have much harsher examples to guide us, from Solzhenitsyn to Coposu, or whoever else you may find who had to cultivate a discipline of the mind in order to survive. Now, whether we can actually learn from those examples (as opposed to sheer experience), that's a whole other question.
[...] this year I've done too many things to enumerate in a mere blogpost. So, much like the previous rotation around the sun, I'll summarize everything into this neat list of lessons [...]