Living Without Living

(currently listening to The Minus 5)
I just returned from seeing “Collateral.” Even if you haven’t seen it, you probably know the premise: Tom Cruise plays a hit man who forces Jamie Foxx to drive him around the city. The main story is mediocre, typical bad huy-good good chases and gunshots. However, there is another story working that I enjoyed far more. Jamie Foxx’s Max is paralyzed with not doing what he wants, and he convinced himself that the past twelve years of driving taxis is a temporary job. Vincent chides him for not doing that which he really wants. While Max criticizes Vincent for senseless killing, Vincent makes a case for existentialism in that nothing really matters. Killing a man in an apartment is no different than 10,000 Rwandans dying in one day. Nobody notices. They both criticize the other for not really living: Vincent in his morally corrupt occupation, Max in his dead-end one.

I could continue, but this is not a movie review. I felt a connection to this message of living without living. I have been inwardly complaining about some aspects of my current situation here in Korea. As the sign states on the subway in the concluding scene in the movie, “Life is too short.”