What's the point.

I'm sitting with my dad. We're playing Rummy 500, he's winning, I'm moody but participating. It's his turn, but all of a sudden he puts his cards down on the table and begins gesticulating wildly.

"The camera zooms out! We're over the house," his hands are in the air, symbolizing the imaginary 'camera' or perhaps 'us'. He makes a sound effect that is meant to be the camera zooming. "The camera zooms out! We're over all of Mississauga!" I'm watching him, patiently, amused in spite of my mood. Zooming camera sound. "Zoom out! We're over Canada!" He thinks about this for a second. "North America!" he settles on. Then we're over the whole world, then somewhere in the middle of the universe. He pauses, palms out, fingers splayed, staring at me. I raise my eyebrows.

"We're just specks," he says quietly, as though still floating around the outer Milky Way. "What's the point? What are we doing? You work like an idiot your entire life and for what? You can't take it with you."

Another pause and then he lays down most of his cards, officially destroying any chance I had to win the hand.

As far as I can determine, my dad's basic philosophy on life is that you struggle, you suffer, you do what you gotta do, then you die.

I kind of agree. Except for the suffering bit.

I don't believe in heaven or hell. Or, for the record, purgatory, transmigration and reincarnation are out too. I look at humans as animals with sentience and a greater intelligence than other animals. We're here because a series of universal accidents, but the cosmos existed before us, it'll exist after us and, yeah, there's almost definitely other life out there pretending to be important too. The meaning of life? It's just what you make of it. The point? There is none.

That doesn't mean you can't have some fun.

I'm a bit childish. A "dork", I've been told. I like trying new things, I like to play, I like exploring -- I like fun. I don't necessarily think there's any "right" or "wrong" way to live one's life, I personally just try to take other people into consideration. One piece of religious doctrine that I've adopted for myself seems to be "do unto others", not that I'm always successful.

It's part of the reason I liked drugs, alcohol and random socialization. I embraced the fact that it altered your perception on the world, that for awhile you were a skewed version of yourself with a modified way of interacting with your surroundings. The fact that booze is legal and most recreational drugs aren't was totally irrelevent to me, I generally see things a bit differently and I figured I wasn't really harming anyone other than, potentially, myself.

Since rehab, I've had many friends and family members express how my behaviour hurt them, worried them, confused them. I thought it was just me using and playing and having fun, but part of the problem was the fact that it started to isolate me, allow me to think selfishly, as though my need to do whatever I wanted trumped all else. Having a worldview where you create your own meaning, well, that's just not who I want to be.

I'm not comfortable with never drinking or using again, but that's not what this is about right now. I'm not fully on steady ground quite yet, the depression is still prevalent, my living situation makes me feel isolated and lonely, but I know it's not going to be like this forever and I try not to dwell on it too much.

Life is only suffering if you think of it that way.