The sad truth of the matter is, you don’t matter. I don’t matter. In the grand scheme of things, our lives are meaningless.

Now if that isn’t the most fucking depressing start to a blog post that anyone has ever written, then I don’t know what is. But I do have a point, but I need to talk about some personal stuff to make it.

The health of my family has been on my mind a lot lately. My brother is suffering from kidney failure, my mom’s health is declining, my dad is up there in age. Nobody lives forever. I, myself, will turn 41 years old in March. With the way I take care of myself, I’m probably well over half way through my life. Granted, I can’t know that for sure. I may croak tomorrow or I might live another 60 years.

The thing is, that for everyone who dies, the world goes on after they leave. I’m a Philadelphia Eagles fan. Die hard, really. If I lived in Philly, I’d probably be one of those guys with face paint on every Sunday and more merch than I could afford. But the Eagles will continue to exist and play football long after I’m dead. The world doesn’t stop when you die.

I’ve been thinking about this, and it makes me feel small. What impact do you really leave on the world, when it can carry on as if you never existed? The answer really is that the biggest impact you have isn’t on the world, but on the lives of others.

Your friends and family will miss you when you’re gone. Their lives will be different when you’re gone. We may not matter to the world, but we do matter to the people around us, and that’s important. It’s more important than making your mark on the world.

It’s why I’ve been thinking about friendship again. I have a lot of online “friends”. I’d like to think if I met them in the real world our friendship would grow stronger. I’d like to think that I matter to them as much as they matter to me. But with online friends, its hard to tell how much your friendship really means to the other person. Do you cross their mind at all? or are you just some rando on the Internet that they interact with from time to time? You never can tell, as Chuck Berry used to say.

I don’t have many real life, in person, friends. Part of it is, I don’t go out of the house much (that might change when I get a new job, we’ll see). It’s hard to find and make new friends when you don’t go out and about. Another part of it is, I’ve never been good at making friends. The few that I’ve had throughout my life have passed me by eventually. No shade on them, it’s just natural. Hardly anyone stays in touch with the people they went to school with. Random Facebook interactions don’t really count, and I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t even recognize half the people in my Facebook friends list.

I think that what this all comes down to, is that I’m not sure I matter to many people in my life. I’ve been a bit depressed about it. I know I have a bit of an online following, and I have great online friends, but the real life stuff, or lack thereof, has begun to bother me more and more as I’ve contemplated the mortality of my immediate family.

Everyone matters to those around them, but in order for that to be true about me, I have to have people around me. If that makes any sense. I had a much more depressing way of saying it, but I deleted it. This post has already been depressing enough.

Who do you leave behind, and how much of an impact have you had on their lives? This is what I’ve been thinking about these last few days. Needless to say, I’ve been a bit depressed about it, and I’ve struggled a little to get past it. I’ll be okay. I didn’t write this to ask for sympathy or to solicit friendship from others. I just needed to get it out, and my blog is the place where I do that sort of thing.

As I write this, it’s Christmas. So, despite my depressed ass working to make you depressed as well, Marry Christmas. This made me laugh because if you read the first and last sentences of this post, you’d think this was written by someone with serious mental problems. Wait. Fuck. lmao.