"It was just a feeling."

There's nothing cute or nostalgic about nighttime dreams coinciding with revealing visions of what the future will be like if I simply stay the course.
I won't turn into my mom and I won't turn into my dad, but I'll make similar mistakes that, when I was 18, I confidently knew how to avoid.
I have this system of voting in which everything I do casts a vote for a particular category (smoking a cigarette simultaneously votes for freedom from society and slavery to a chemical or a large company), remember? But I'm throwing all of this out the window with a relationship based on compromise. Is it worth it? Well, according to one of the most polarized authors out there, "in any compromise between good and evil, only evil can benefit."
It feels right intellectually despising glowing rectangles because everything projected is, however subtly, someone's point of view. These points of view seem to boil down to absolutely nothing, leading an acute observer to a dead end. Once there, why go on? Maybe there's not always a quick path cut through differing agendas. Or maybe that's the point. Maybe there's no way out and the end result is time having been killed.
And work is no exception, which is my fault. I allow myself hours in front of this screen because smoking cigarettes throws my mind off kilter and I don't trust myself to retain the knowledge in a book. So I spend my time on things I don't care to retain, like baseball analysis and cheap news articles. And the same routine is practiced when I arrive at home, except in front of a much larger rectangle and with more structured non-sense, like sporting events and television shows and excerpts of movies that aren't worth watching all the way through. Or maybe I go out and actively kill brain cells as opposed to merely boring them to death.
But this is the way of life amongst myself and my friends and my family. There are occasional moments of joy derived from pleasures devoid of an anonymous third-party's voice or instruction, but the consistency is unreliable and, especially in February, it isn't difficult to go through a three-week span of mindlessness.