I would rather be ashes than dust
I would rather that my spark should burn out
in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot.
I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom
of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.
The function of man is to live, not to exist.
I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them.
I shall use my time.
Jack London
Source: Ernest J. Hopkins, San Francisco Bulletin, 2 December 1916
Here I am, another asshole with a camera and a crisis. The Irrawaddy dumps me here like so much spiritual cargo, and I stand there with my manufactured wonder, my photo ready epiphany, feeling the whole rotting weight of my bullshit pressing down like the heat.
But here’s the knife twist, I’m not even here for me. I’m here because someone else wrote the script, someone else’s dream of what “living” means, and I went along with it like a coward. Like saying yes was easier than saying “this isn’t me.” So now I’m floating down this river toward temples I don’t give a damn about, checking boxes on someone else’s bucket list, and the worst part is I knew. I knew walking in that this whole performance, the superficial seeking, the faux wandering, the shallow spiritual tourism, was everything I despise.
I wanted authentic? I got a postcard of someone else’s life. I got a thousand temples and a million other seekers just like me, except they actually want to be here. They’re reading from the same script, sure, but at least it’s their script. Me? I’m not even the protagonist of my own sellout. I’m the supporting actor in someone else’s fantasy about what it means to be alive, and every golden spire is just another monument to my own capitulation.
Yangon at least had the decency to be messy, to refuse projection. But here? Here I get exactly what I pretended to want, which is why I hate it twice, once for being tourist trash, and once for reminding me that I chose this life. That I traded my actual self for someone else’s idea of what I should be experiencing.
Jack London had it wrong: sometimes you’re neither meteor nor planet. Sometimes you’re just a tourist in your own life, going through someone else’s motions, pretending the view means something while your actual self drowns in the Irrawaddy.