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The Danger of Living Provisionally
Sep. 28th, 2025 09:27 pmThe Christians are not OK, and the latest evidence of this is a Rapture that was supposed to arrive by September 23 or 24, 2025. A man in South Africa had a vision that the Rapture would arrive with this year’s Feast of Trumpets (whatever that is) and Rosh Hashanah. More than a few American Christians took this prediction as a new gospel, walking away from their jobs, selling their cars, (allegedly) giving their children to DCFS, attempting to arrange permanent caretakers for their pets, and generally flocking to social media with the good news that they were going away.
The internet could not resist such delectable cringe, and naturally there were at least five parodies for every two-cent Rapturetok influencer who assailed the general public with smug, fake tears about the glorious future that only applied to them and a few other saved souls. Predictably, Kingdom Come failed to arrive on schedule, the loudest of the crows deleted their TikToks in shame, and many more kicked the Rapture can down the road, re-setting the date for another arbitrary goalpost.
For me, September 23 was just another equinox marked by my usual solitary, occult hygiene practices and unusually lovely weather. I worked that day. I made lunch. My husband made dinner. I swept the floor and washed dishes. I did yard work. Mainstream media exploited September 23 for its various psyops and mass hypnosis attempts. I ignored all of it.
Tomorrow never comes
The term provisional living was the Jungian analyst H.G. Baynes, who used it to describe a special sort of immaturity in an adult person. Jung thought of provisional living as an aspect of Puer aeternus, the inner child who, like Peter Pan, refuses to grow up. Jung described provisional living as “the modern European disease of the merely imaginary life” and considered it a form of neurosis. Though I wholeheartedly agree with Jung about provisional living being a form of immaturity, it is also contains a misguided form of discipline which has more to do with Senex than Puer. I also think it is a dire mistake to think of provisional living as confined to the West.
The essence of a provisional life is to wait. Those who live provisionally cannot truly enjoy the now. The current moment is always a bridge (a broken, precarious structure at that) between yesterday and a far more exciting future.
In order to talk about the latest Rapture misfire, it is useful to understand that it is one in a long series that neither began nor ended with William Miller, the 19th century Protestant preacher who had his own vision of the world ending on October 22, 1844. Biblical-literalist Miller crowed about the Second Coming from 1831 onward, garnering a crowd of approximately 100,000 believers who sold their belongings, walked away from prosperous farms, and threw their lives under the bus in order to join his doomsday cult. Newspapers and the penny press (yesteryear’s equivalent of tabloids) had a field day satirizing Miller and his movement, calling him out for personally profiting from his lectures and lambasting his devotees as future insane asylum patients.
I wish the Rapturetok people had done a tiny bit of digging on Google to discover the story of the Millerites. The aftermath of Miller’s failed prophecies was called the Great Disappointment. The Great Disappointment gathered too much steam to go out with a whimper, and the massive egregore it grew ended up birthing both the Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Adventists and the Witnesses are proselytizing doomsday cults that are remarkable among mainstream religions (this is a real achievement considering their competition) for their prolific abuse of children and the rampant, barely-contained psychoses of their congregants. I have yet to meet an Adventist or a JW who is not deeply unwell, and more often than not, they are plagued with provisional living that comes from their religion’s fetishization of a golden city that is always a few weeks, months, or years in the future.
Coronapocalypse: when faith fails, make your own Rapture
The Left cannot help to imitate what it hates. The Left, headed by a bunch of psychopathic gay luxury communists, fomented its own Rapture in the form of overreaction to a manufactured virus that was said to have “escaped” LOL from a lab into a nearby Wuhan wet market. The crazy thing about the Coronapocalypse is it almost worked, mainly because it delivered Rapture to a small set of lucky, upper-middle class people in the form of home confinement and telecommuting.
In lieu of a New Jerusalem, the Bathroom Class got to stay home while the masked, lumpen proletariat delivered their pad thai to them by car. Unlike those gullible Christians, the Bathroom Class got their Paradise immediately, paid for by the suffering and disenfranchisement of regular people who lost their businesses, those who stroked out from the mandatory vaccine and lost their jobs anyway, and those who were not allowed to enter the hospital to hold grandfather’s hand one last time as he passed out of this world into the next. Their City of God was the living room, binge watching Netflix on the flat screen as the world burned. Their baptism rite was the Covid vaccine. Their altars were any screen with an internet connection.
Coronapocalypse actually delivered, and that is why it had to be stretched out. At first it was three weeks to flatten the curve; this quickly morphed into three years. They pretended the apocalypse had not yet truly happened while it was ongoing. Situations were always being depicted as worsening even while nurses and doctors had ample time to choreograph elaborate dance routines in empty hospitals. Even while they luxuriated in stimulus money that for them was not exactly the difference between living and dying, they lived provisionally, anxiously awaiting the real luxury communism revolution when Covid rules went permanent, everybody had Universal Basic Income, and all of life’s necessities were delivered mysteriously and magically to one’s door by drone. They remained an anxious lot, quaffing copious Zoom-doctor-prescribed antidepressants (among other substances) and trying to squelch/outrun that nagging feeling that something was very, very wrong.
The moral of the story is that some people will never be happy in the moment no matter how many goodies they acquire.
Not just for kids
Like I said earlier in this essay, it is a mistake to think of living provisionally as a hundred percent childish. It’s not all Puer all the time. There is quite a bit of Senex in provisional living, because it involves imposing strict limits upon oneself to satisfy the requirements of the future. Jung attributes provisional living to Puer and the element of air because of its rootlessness and Puer’s dislike of commitment, but I would argue provisional living is all about commitment. The commitment of living provisionally is not to the world around them, nor is it to live in the moment, no matter how hedonistic some of them may be. The focus of someone who lives provisionally is laser-accurate — it’s on the future. The future is what drives them above and beyond normal limits. The future is what causes them to abuse and neglect their children. It is why they are terrible to all of the people around them and why they do not appreciate anything or anyone they have. It is why they are all signal and no virtue. They are always putting the current moment on layaway for the future, and 99.9 percent of the time, they die paying for a product they never get to put their hands on and enjoy.
I knew a religious woman for whom the disease of provisional living was incurable and acute. She lusted for an Apocalypse that never arrived, goaded on by the Protestant Christian cult that told her it was on a nearby horizon. She had loved ones, half of whom she alienated with provisional living behavioral tics such as conning relatives into buying her large ticket items and then selling those items to people who lived in her apartment complex. She was always on the make with such schemes, and when she was not preoccupied with interfamily con jobs, she was complaining about her aches, pains, and other horrors of age. She did not complain about the Rapture. For one day, she was confident she would be scooped up to the clouds with the other chosen ones to sit at the right hand of Jesus. She would be without pain and made perfect as she sat next to her Creator.
Strangely, when she got old, she was afraid to die. Though she had fantasized about rejoining the other side since girlhood, when the time finally came, she was absolutely terrified.
Putting the mori into hikikomori
The provisional life is full of fantasy, and it is not of a sort that winds up being productive. The future can never be real because it is always out of reach, and the provisional life takes place in the future, whether that is the Golden City of the Rapture or some other place. I am not a fan of video games (a.k.a. games) because they take Puer’s infantile fantasy of a perfect, idyllic world and make it real enough and full of dopamine triggers that keep him or her trapped and useless until he or she is a hikikomori — still technically alive but otherwise dead in almost every meaningful sense of the term.
The provisional life is full of excuses. When those truly affected with provisional living syndrome have jobs, it is either by some nepotistic/convenient miracle or it is an extremely temporary condition. They cannot stand to work because work takes them away from their intoxicating fantasy worlds. We cannot claim that the provisional life is for the lazy; actually it takes more work to live under threat of homelessness because of dedication to an absurd dream than to stay on the straight and narrow and collect a reliable paycheck. I saw one provisional Puella Aeternis bounce through several homes (one paid for in cash by her father) until she died homeless on the streets of Los Angeles. She never gave up hanging out at the goth clubs though, no matter how sick or immobile she became.
Jung suggests Puers get a job — any job — and to stick with it no matter how bad or unsuitable, in order to break the cycle. I wonder if he ever got any of his patients to do this, and if so, how did it work out?
The Rapture, or whatever ideal lies just down the line, in the afterworld, or next life, keeps its victim saying “not yet, not now”. There is no point in getting anything done or investing any part of one’s real self in a human relationship because it is all an illusion and it is all temporary. I have no idea what ancient Gnostics were like nor do I have any way of speculating, but if they were like the modern day black-pilled crew who think the world is run by evil Archons, they are annoying gits. It’s not worthy of them being genocided of course, but I can at understand the impulse. There is an element of holier-than-thou about provisional living — if only we denizens of the “real” world could measure up to the lowliest NPCs of the fantasy, the gameworld, or the Golden City, then the hikikomori would come back down to Earth and join the living again.
The Great Awakening
I barf a little in my mouth when I see the term "Great Awakening" in print, and I truly do not like to vomit. Humans are never going to collectively ascend because humans are not that bright of a species. We are somewhere in the lower middle between plankton and angels, and with the huge influx of animal souls into our teeming, nearly 10 billion large population, we are not getting smarter anytime soon. Humans have been engaging in the same stupid foibles since our beginnings in trees and grasslands as recent ex-chimpanzees. We have always formed groups and violently raided other groups for resources just as our chimp cousins like to do; we are actually more stupid about it now because we have nuclear weapons. Everyone from dippy-hippie-trippy New Agers to New Right podcasters thinks we are on the precipice of mass enlightenment, and this merely proves that spiritual retardation is at its all-time worst.
This is the most materialistic age the Earth has ever seen. There is only one thing special about our era, and that is how decidedly obtuse most people have become to the subtle planes. We live in an age of spiritual leprosy where almost everyone, including myself, is born with a set of spiritual impediments that shut us out of the kind of self-development past mystics were able to take for granted.
The Native Americans found this out quite horribly when white men marched on them, took their land, and were able to wipe out their civilizations with betrayal and smallpox. Their magic failed them and not for lack of trying. The strength of materialism and capitalist greed proved to be stronger magic, at least for the time being. Materialist enchantments still hold the land and will not let go until the last plane falls from the sky and the last car sputters to a halt on the last intact asphalt road. That time is coming and with it, the old ways will re-establish themselves. They are not coming in great proliferation anytime soon; this is not the cycle for them. Living for that era is not a good idea because it is a long way off.
People who live provisionally are jerks
Living provisionally is expensive, both literally and figuratively. When a person does not consider pulling their own weight as important as say, going to the club, playing the latest Roblox game, or being at home during the scheduled time allotted to this year's Rapture, everyone around her is going to have to work double time in order to keep her afloat. I wrinkle my nose in disgust whenever I pass a certain recently rebuilt McMansion in my old hometown. I know the McMansion’s owner: she is the mother of a drunk/drug addict. I am pretty certain she had an attached guest house built for her ne’er-do-well child so that child can pretend to live an adult life while staying regularly inebriated and sleeping until 3:38pm. There is a young mother on TikTok who ought to be more concerned that she was fired from her job after fervently praying to be home on September 23 and trying to take time off that her boss would not allow. My friend who died homeless in LA often acted like a deranged stalker if a band she liked came to town.
There are many Rapturetok believers who clearly were not about to take their pets or children with them when they were to be swept away by Jesus. That sort of perversion takes both an unwillingness to commit to children and pets and an extreme commitment to some random South African dude’s vision. Being a jerk takes commitment, and let's not even go into what Coronapocalypse believers were willing to do in order to extend stay-at-home mandates.
Guilty!
You don’t have to be a Rapturetok, Millerite, or a Covidiot cultist to live provisionally; not by a long shot. If you’ve ever fantasized about gaining a windfall, winning the lottery, or “making it”, you've probably been a victim of the provisional lifestyle. If you have ever held on to a piece of clothing that does not fit because you have delusions of losing weight, you have lived provisionally. If you have ever stayed with someone you hate because he or she was "good enough" until you got someone better, you have lived provisionally. Living provisionally is miserable. I know this from personal experience.
To my own chagrin, it has taken me over a half century to understand that I too make the mistake of living provisionally, and to add insult to injury, I still do it. My entire youth was misspent in princess/girlboss fantasies egged on by my own milieu’s demented secular religion of Disney movies (this is back when they were good), sitcoms, magazines, pop music, public schools, and other forms of upper-middle class conditioning. I was taught that going to college would fulfill all my dreams, and though I survived intact, it did not deliver anything near what it promised.
I have credit card debt that is the direct result of taking on expenses I had faith I would one day easily pay off. The day has come for me to pay off my debts and it has not been easy. I have had to train myself to go to the bathroom when nature calls, because I am the sort of dumbass who ignores her own biological signals in order to stay in whatever zone I am in, whether that is work or play. To ignore the need to pee because a task “needs to get done” or because some important person cannot be interrupted is profoundly stupid and a form of living provisionally — “I will listen to my body’s needs someday when I am not so beholden to others”. Ugh...It’s garbage. Listen to your body now, not someday.
I wish these were the only examples of times I have lived provisionally… No, they are not, and I have many that are much, much worse. In order to stop living provisionally, we must first catch ourselves doing it and recognize it as a defense mechanism.
Provisional living is a defense. To live provisionally is an attempt to protect oneself from the “real” world that is perceived as hostile, horrible, and disappointing. The Great Disappointment was a fascinating and apt term because the truth of living provisionally is disappointment. The woman I mentioned who lived for a Rapture that never came, yet was afraid of death, is someone who lived in constant disappointment. Nothing on this planet was good enough for the likes of her, and the second it was, she tried to sell it or whined about how long it would take to get more. People who live in disappointment die in disappointment: the goofy idea among provisional livers that the state of death changes consciousness that is simply untrue. The karma of being constantly disappointed is to continue being disappointed until you learn not to be disappointed.
Once again, the solution is simple but not easy: gratitude. There is only one way to extricate oneself from aspects of Meatworld life being so consistently disappointing and that is to take yourself out of the Roblox game, to exit the Society for Creative Anachronism LARPs, to rip yourself out of the visions of your sandaled feet on streets paved with precious gemstones with that entity pretending to be Jesus, and to start appreciating what you have, exactly where you have it.
That means staying with your job as long as they will tolerate you, reframing the relationship with your children and mate as permanent and not just a stop on a way station going somewhere better, and thanking the bed you sleep upon. It means being thankful for the strip mall being open when you need a quick snack instead of being full of anger that it is ugly and used to be a lovely field of wildflowers before it was paved over. It means sweeping your floor in the morning and washing your own dishes. It means replacing the urge to escape with the determination of making the best out of what is here and now. It means seeing the good in what is all around you and being thankful for what you have. It means being humble and not feeling that the world owes you a living. It means you have to stop asking God for favors and then pretending the small signs you are being given are meant to fulfill your wishes. It means understanding that the will of God is not going to be what you want exactly when you want it.
Being grateful is extremely hard work and it takes great determination. It is worth it. Life begins when you stop living provisionally. Life begins when you get rid of the old stuff you no longer use. Life begins when you go to the bathroom when you need to go. Life begins when you hang the ugly wallpaper merely because it makes you happy. Life begins when you stop waiting for someone else to clean your room and make your bed and do it your damn self. Life begins when you say “thank you” instead of planning your escape.
The internet could not resist such delectable cringe, and naturally there were at least five parodies for every two-cent Rapturetok influencer who assailed the general public with smug, fake tears about the glorious future that only applied to them and a few other saved souls. Predictably, Kingdom Come failed to arrive on schedule, the loudest of the crows deleted their TikToks in shame, and many more kicked the Rapture can down the road, re-setting the date for another arbitrary goalpost.
For me, September 23 was just another equinox marked by my usual solitary, occult hygiene practices and unusually lovely weather. I worked that day. I made lunch. My husband made dinner. I swept the floor and washed dishes. I did yard work. Mainstream media exploited September 23 for its various psyops and mass hypnosis attempts. I ignored all of it.
Tomorrow never comes
The term provisional living was the Jungian analyst H.G. Baynes, who used it to describe a special sort of immaturity in an adult person. Jung thought of provisional living as an aspect of Puer aeternus, the inner child who, like Peter Pan, refuses to grow up. Jung described provisional living as “the modern European disease of the merely imaginary life” and considered it a form of neurosis. Though I wholeheartedly agree with Jung about provisional living being a form of immaturity, it is also contains a misguided form of discipline which has more to do with Senex than Puer. I also think it is a dire mistake to think of provisional living as confined to the West.
The essence of a provisional life is to wait. Those who live provisionally cannot truly enjoy the now. The current moment is always a bridge (a broken, precarious structure at that) between yesterday and a far more exciting future.
In order to talk about the latest Rapture misfire, it is useful to understand that it is one in a long series that neither began nor ended with William Miller, the 19th century Protestant preacher who had his own vision of the world ending on October 22, 1844. Biblical-literalist Miller crowed about the Second Coming from 1831 onward, garnering a crowd of approximately 100,000 believers who sold their belongings, walked away from prosperous farms, and threw their lives under the bus in order to join his doomsday cult. Newspapers and the penny press (yesteryear’s equivalent of tabloids) had a field day satirizing Miller and his movement, calling him out for personally profiting from his lectures and lambasting his devotees as future insane asylum patients.
I wish the Rapturetok people had done a tiny bit of digging on Google to discover the story of the Millerites. The aftermath of Miller’s failed prophecies was called the Great Disappointment. The Great Disappointment gathered too much steam to go out with a whimper, and the massive egregore it grew ended up birthing both the Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Adventists and the Witnesses are proselytizing doomsday cults that are remarkable among mainstream religions (this is a real achievement considering their competition) for their prolific abuse of children and the rampant, barely-contained psychoses of their congregants. I have yet to meet an Adventist or a JW who is not deeply unwell, and more often than not, they are plagued with provisional living that comes from their religion’s fetishization of a golden city that is always a few weeks, months, or years in the future.
Coronapocalypse: when faith fails, make your own Rapture
The Left cannot help to imitate what it hates. The Left, headed by a bunch of psychopathic gay luxury communists, fomented its own Rapture in the form of overreaction to a manufactured virus that was said to have “escaped” LOL from a lab into a nearby Wuhan wet market. The crazy thing about the Coronapocalypse is it almost worked, mainly because it delivered Rapture to a small set of lucky, upper-middle class people in the form of home confinement and telecommuting.
In lieu of a New Jerusalem, the Bathroom Class got to stay home while the masked, lumpen proletariat delivered their pad thai to them by car. Unlike those gullible Christians, the Bathroom Class got their Paradise immediately, paid for by the suffering and disenfranchisement of regular people who lost their businesses, those who stroked out from the mandatory vaccine and lost their jobs anyway, and those who were not allowed to enter the hospital to hold grandfather’s hand one last time as he passed out of this world into the next. Their City of God was the living room, binge watching Netflix on the flat screen as the world burned. Their baptism rite was the Covid vaccine. Their altars were any screen with an internet connection.
Coronapocalypse actually delivered, and that is why it had to be stretched out. At first it was three weeks to flatten the curve; this quickly morphed into three years. They pretended the apocalypse had not yet truly happened while it was ongoing. Situations were always being depicted as worsening even while nurses and doctors had ample time to choreograph elaborate dance routines in empty hospitals. Even while they luxuriated in stimulus money that for them was not exactly the difference between living and dying, they lived provisionally, anxiously awaiting the real luxury communism revolution when Covid rules went permanent, everybody had Universal Basic Income, and all of life’s necessities were delivered mysteriously and magically to one’s door by drone. They remained an anxious lot, quaffing copious Zoom-doctor-prescribed antidepressants (among other substances) and trying to squelch/outrun that nagging feeling that something was very, very wrong.
The moral of the story is that some people will never be happy in the moment no matter how many goodies they acquire.
Not just for kids
Like I said earlier in this essay, it is a mistake to think of living provisionally as a hundred percent childish. It’s not all Puer all the time. There is quite a bit of Senex in provisional living, because it involves imposing strict limits upon oneself to satisfy the requirements of the future. Jung attributes provisional living to Puer and the element of air because of its rootlessness and Puer’s dislike of commitment, but I would argue provisional living is all about commitment. The commitment of living provisionally is not to the world around them, nor is it to live in the moment, no matter how hedonistic some of them may be. The focus of someone who lives provisionally is laser-accurate — it’s on the future. The future is what drives them above and beyond normal limits. The future is what causes them to abuse and neglect their children. It is why they are terrible to all of the people around them and why they do not appreciate anything or anyone they have. It is why they are all signal and no virtue. They are always putting the current moment on layaway for the future, and 99.9 percent of the time, they die paying for a product they never get to put their hands on and enjoy.
I knew a religious woman for whom the disease of provisional living was incurable and acute. She lusted for an Apocalypse that never arrived, goaded on by the Protestant Christian cult that told her it was on a nearby horizon. She had loved ones, half of whom she alienated with provisional living behavioral tics such as conning relatives into buying her large ticket items and then selling those items to people who lived in her apartment complex. She was always on the make with such schemes, and when she was not preoccupied with interfamily con jobs, she was complaining about her aches, pains, and other horrors of age. She did not complain about the Rapture. For one day, she was confident she would be scooped up to the clouds with the other chosen ones to sit at the right hand of Jesus. She would be without pain and made perfect as she sat next to her Creator.
Strangely, when she got old, she was afraid to die. Though she had fantasized about rejoining the other side since girlhood, when the time finally came, she was absolutely terrified.
Putting the mori into hikikomori
The provisional life is full of fantasy, and it is not of a sort that winds up being productive. The future can never be real because it is always out of reach, and the provisional life takes place in the future, whether that is the Golden City of the Rapture or some other place. I am not a fan of video games (a.k.a. games) because they take Puer’s infantile fantasy of a perfect, idyllic world and make it real enough and full of dopamine triggers that keep him or her trapped and useless until he or she is a hikikomori — still technically alive but otherwise dead in almost every meaningful sense of the term.
The provisional life is full of excuses. When those truly affected with provisional living syndrome have jobs, it is either by some nepotistic/convenient miracle or it is an extremely temporary condition. They cannot stand to work because work takes them away from their intoxicating fantasy worlds. We cannot claim that the provisional life is for the lazy; actually it takes more work to live under threat of homelessness because of dedication to an absurd dream than to stay on the straight and narrow and collect a reliable paycheck. I saw one provisional Puella Aeternis bounce through several homes (one paid for in cash by her father) until she died homeless on the streets of Los Angeles. She never gave up hanging out at the goth clubs though, no matter how sick or immobile she became.
Jung suggests Puers get a job — any job — and to stick with it no matter how bad or unsuitable, in order to break the cycle. I wonder if he ever got any of his patients to do this, and if so, how did it work out?
The Rapture, or whatever ideal lies just down the line, in the afterworld, or next life, keeps its victim saying “not yet, not now”. There is no point in getting anything done or investing any part of one’s real self in a human relationship because it is all an illusion and it is all temporary. I have no idea what ancient Gnostics were like nor do I have any way of speculating, but if they were like the modern day black-pilled crew who think the world is run by evil Archons, they are annoying gits. It’s not worthy of them being genocided of course, but I can at understand the impulse. There is an element of holier-than-thou about provisional living — if only we denizens of the “real” world could measure up to the lowliest NPCs of the fantasy, the gameworld, or the Golden City, then the hikikomori would come back down to Earth and join the living again.
The Great Awakening
I barf a little in my mouth when I see the term "Great Awakening" in print, and I truly do not like to vomit. Humans are never going to collectively ascend because humans are not that bright of a species. We are somewhere in the lower middle between plankton and angels, and with the huge influx of animal souls into our teeming, nearly 10 billion large population, we are not getting smarter anytime soon. Humans have been engaging in the same stupid foibles since our beginnings in trees and grasslands as recent ex-chimpanzees. We have always formed groups and violently raided other groups for resources just as our chimp cousins like to do; we are actually more stupid about it now because we have nuclear weapons. Everyone from dippy-hippie-trippy New Agers to New Right podcasters thinks we are on the precipice of mass enlightenment, and this merely proves that spiritual retardation is at its all-time worst.
This is the most materialistic age the Earth has ever seen. There is only one thing special about our era, and that is how decidedly obtuse most people have become to the subtle planes. We live in an age of spiritual leprosy where almost everyone, including myself, is born with a set of spiritual impediments that shut us out of the kind of self-development past mystics were able to take for granted.
The Native Americans found this out quite horribly when white men marched on them, took their land, and were able to wipe out their civilizations with betrayal and smallpox. Their magic failed them and not for lack of trying. The strength of materialism and capitalist greed proved to be stronger magic, at least for the time being. Materialist enchantments still hold the land and will not let go until the last plane falls from the sky and the last car sputters to a halt on the last intact asphalt road. That time is coming and with it, the old ways will re-establish themselves. They are not coming in great proliferation anytime soon; this is not the cycle for them. Living for that era is not a good idea because it is a long way off.
People who live provisionally are jerks
Living provisionally is expensive, both literally and figuratively. When a person does not consider pulling their own weight as important as say, going to the club, playing the latest Roblox game, or being at home during the scheduled time allotted to this year's Rapture, everyone around her is going to have to work double time in order to keep her afloat. I wrinkle my nose in disgust whenever I pass a certain recently rebuilt McMansion in my old hometown. I know the McMansion’s owner: she is the mother of a drunk/drug addict. I am pretty certain she had an attached guest house built for her ne’er-do-well child so that child can pretend to live an adult life while staying regularly inebriated and sleeping until 3:38pm. There is a young mother on TikTok who ought to be more concerned that she was fired from her job after fervently praying to be home on September 23 and trying to take time off that her boss would not allow. My friend who died homeless in LA often acted like a deranged stalker if a band she liked came to town.
There are many Rapturetok believers who clearly were not about to take their pets or children with them when they were to be swept away by Jesus. That sort of perversion takes both an unwillingness to commit to children and pets and an extreme commitment to some random South African dude’s vision. Being a jerk takes commitment, and let's not even go into what Coronapocalypse believers were willing to do in order to extend stay-at-home mandates.
Guilty!
You don’t have to be a Rapturetok, Millerite, or a Covidiot cultist to live provisionally; not by a long shot. If you’ve ever fantasized about gaining a windfall, winning the lottery, or “making it”, you've probably been a victim of the provisional lifestyle. If you have ever held on to a piece of clothing that does not fit because you have delusions of losing weight, you have lived provisionally. If you have ever stayed with someone you hate because he or she was "good enough" until you got someone better, you have lived provisionally. Living provisionally is miserable. I know this from personal experience.
To my own chagrin, it has taken me over a half century to understand that I too make the mistake of living provisionally, and to add insult to injury, I still do it. My entire youth was misspent in princess/girlboss fantasies egged on by my own milieu’s demented secular religion of Disney movies (this is back when they were good), sitcoms, magazines, pop music, public schools, and other forms of upper-middle class conditioning. I was taught that going to college would fulfill all my dreams, and though I survived intact, it did not deliver anything near what it promised.
I have credit card debt that is the direct result of taking on expenses I had faith I would one day easily pay off. The day has come for me to pay off my debts and it has not been easy. I have had to train myself to go to the bathroom when nature calls, because I am the sort of dumbass who ignores her own biological signals in order to stay in whatever zone I am in, whether that is work or play. To ignore the need to pee because a task “needs to get done” or because some important person cannot be interrupted is profoundly stupid and a form of living provisionally — “I will listen to my body’s needs someday when I am not so beholden to others”. Ugh...It’s garbage. Listen to your body now, not someday.
I wish these were the only examples of times I have lived provisionally… No, they are not, and I have many that are much, much worse. In order to stop living provisionally, we must first catch ourselves doing it and recognize it as a defense mechanism.
Provisional living is a defense. To live provisionally is an attempt to protect oneself from the “real” world that is perceived as hostile, horrible, and disappointing. The Great Disappointment was a fascinating and apt term because the truth of living provisionally is disappointment. The woman I mentioned who lived for a Rapture that never came, yet was afraid of death, is someone who lived in constant disappointment. Nothing on this planet was good enough for the likes of her, and the second it was, she tried to sell it or whined about how long it would take to get more. People who live in disappointment die in disappointment: the goofy idea among provisional livers that the state of death changes consciousness that is simply untrue. The karma of being constantly disappointed is to continue being disappointed until you learn not to be disappointed.
Once again, the solution is simple but not easy: gratitude. There is only one way to extricate oneself from aspects of Meatworld life being so consistently disappointing and that is to take yourself out of the Roblox game, to exit the Society for Creative Anachronism LARPs, to rip yourself out of the visions of your sandaled feet on streets paved with precious gemstones with that entity pretending to be Jesus, and to start appreciating what you have, exactly where you have it.
That means staying with your job as long as they will tolerate you, reframing the relationship with your children and mate as permanent and not just a stop on a way station going somewhere better, and thanking the bed you sleep upon. It means being thankful for the strip mall being open when you need a quick snack instead of being full of anger that it is ugly and used to be a lovely field of wildflowers before it was paved over. It means sweeping your floor in the morning and washing your own dishes. It means replacing the urge to escape with the determination of making the best out of what is here and now. It means seeing the good in what is all around you and being thankful for what you have. It means being humble and not feeling that the world owes you a living. It means you have to stop asking God for favors and then pretending the small signs you are being given are meant to fulfill your wishes. It means understanding that the will of God is not going to be what you want exactly when you want it.
Being grateful is extremely hard work and it takes great determination. It is worth it. Life begins when you stop living provisionally. Life begins when you get rid of the old stuff you no longer use. Life begins when you go to the bathroom when you need to go. Life begins when you hang the ugly wallpaper merely because it makes you happy. Life begins when you stop waiting for someone else to clean your room and make your bed and do it your damn self. Life begins when you say “thank you” instead of planning your escape.
