How can I learn when death exists?

I am curious about lots of things. Lots of things. However I don't know a lot beyond a few niche topics. My curiousity far exceeds my knowledge.

Whenever I try to commit to a field, I feel this pressure on my chest, this sense of urgency. It's like death is right there, sitting next to me, telling me not to waste my time on these futile pursuits because I will be spontaneously taken away, eventually, anyways. Back to reddit I go.

Recently I have been learning Japanese, but there's this overwhelming feeling of missing out on other topics. I procrastinate, and my progress is suffering.

I'm in high school, and I'm very close to failing math. It seems that there isn't enough reward for all that spent effort, time. I do not want to be a mathematician. Only the basics are necessary. It's just another language, one I'm not interested in learning.

But I have these feelings of envy, you see. I see people on the internet solving complicated physics problems, studying hadron colliders and quantum chromodynamics. But I know to learn this - to feel elite - I need to grind algebra. To speak their language I need to learn the alphabet. But the alphabet takes a long time to learn. And the knowledge is abstract, it takes dedication and interest...lots of spent time.

I know I know nothing, and there's no time. I have my peers' expectations, my parents' expectations, societal expectations, cultural expectations, and worst of all, my own. Everything is arbitrary. And I'm racing against the clock.

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Note: Some of you may say not to worry about it. But if I ignored expectations, my life would mean nothing. I would watch anime and listen to music, all day, in bed. I would sleep through my classes. Little means anything to me; I have to set expectations for myself so I'm not a failure.

Submitted January 28, 2021 at 08:08PM by YourFavoriteUnknown https://ift.tt/2YrfQs1