I haven’t wrote in a while on this site, yet I have been active else where. I am going through another overhaul, I swear if you continuously work on yourself, you’ll never finish.

I am enjoying the sciences a little too much, anyway, here is a question that I came across and thought that I would add my two cents, maybe I still have a heart.

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Question:

Is life a free gift or an obligation to perform?

Answer:

Life is a gift, though it’s not free and has costs that you must maintain or else it can diminish and you could lose it very quickly.

My friend had a congenital disease where his body couldn’t metabolise gluten, he never talked about it or spoke about it. He was my best friend, we partied together, skipped class together, went clubbing together. We shared a lot of time together, we were never smart or academically inclined.

We both tried to be somewhat gangsters I suppose, then I got into a severe car accident. I don’t know what happened while I was rehabilitating, but we reconnected after several years, he turned to drinking, and we would drink together. He always said he was an alcoholic, and I knew he did drugs, but I would have never pinned him as an addict or an actual alcoholic.

One day he went to the hospital for a routine cut on his back, and his blood wouldn’t coagulate (the wound wouldn’t stop bleeding). After that he slipped into a coma and he died. Everything happened so fast, I didn’t know how to process the grief either (frankly I still don’t know).

Before then, I would have said that life is a free gift. I was a child, albeit I was like mid to late twenties, but as you can see it isn’t a gift. If you don’t take care of yourself in all aspects of life, then you will have a very short life. I won’t say that you’ll have a horrible life, because chances are that you had a fairly good childhood, because you are now able to read my answer on this website. So yeah, I’d say relative to others you had a good childhood.

Now that I am older, nearing 40, I look back and I realize that life wasn’t a free gift. The obligations you had as a child are different bonds that invest in your future. When you get older, all else being held constant (this is for the sake of argument), you get paid the dividends of those bonds that you paid for.

I barely paid anything growing up, I got into a car accident that nearly took my life. Life is not a free gift, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

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I type a lot on Quora. and behind gated off forums at the university where I work on my scientific writing. Hope to write soon!