There comes a time in one’s life where you need to look at the decisions that you’ve made, and decide that enough is enough. That just because you’ve spent a great deal of time and effort pursuing something, that alone does not mean that you should continue without purpose, or with misguided purpose. There is a great bravery, I believe, to certain forms of failure, to certain forms of concession, those that cause you to grow in the process, and lead to further success. If one spends their entire life, shortens it even, in the name of a single, unenviable and wrong-headed ethic, then they have written their own epitaph long before their time has come. The drive to persist, to continue, is written deep into the fabric of the human ethos, but doomed is the starving man that walks unstoppably and inexorably toward the center of the desert. That is why, Dear Diary, I believe our time is at an end. You have chronicled my failings dutifully, and it is time for me to find the truth in them, rather than persist foolishly. May that gun one day melt in the fires of Hell.

-Recovered from a dust-stained page in the diary of an unnamed debt collector, written late August, 1877

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