Table of contents
Pressure
Making a choice under pressure is incredibly hard, you always end up choosing to escape, after all hiding in the comfort zone and sleeping is just too comfortable. Or doing the ego thing is easy too, or just breaking down, or giving up. What’s rare is the so-called rational choice, but the rational choice only exists relative to your standpoint, and the standpoint is in turn decided by past experience and personality. So walter, watching his ex run off into a wealthy life, getting refused when someone offered to cover his medical bills, surviving danger again and again, can’t give up cooking. That’s the macro, big-picture level, and after you’ve chosen a direction, how to act is one chain reaction after another, if walter didn’t have the experience and the instinct he could never have survived the danger, maybe it’s precisely because he is so smart that he can keep walking further and further down this painful choice, ordinary people don’t have this kind of high-pressure rational adaptation and self-fed lie.
Family
Family seems to be the last bit of connection to the world when life is dying out. Relationships between people only have rifts because they aren’t transparent. Past experience is a part of who you are now, if the other person can’t share that stretch of experience, then the you in their eyes isn’t the complete you, maybe most relationships need this bit of deception to be sustained, maybe in building a relationship, talking more about so-called past experiences would deepen the relationship.
Life
walter’s later life is like a footnote to his first twenty-some years, it seems everyone has a similar lesson, walter is a nerd, he’s smart, his self-esteem is built on chemistry, and at certain crucial moments, when walter’s ego or his fragile self-esteem gets hurt, he always makes choices that are extremely destructive to his life, like leaving his ex and that company, this kind of choice brought a turning-point-like change to all the life that came after, he spent 1/3 of his life adapting to the aftermath of this choice, but the repression and pain inside him is even more of a torment, isn’t it. Life for him isn’t spontaneous choosing and adapting, it’s more a strong sense of dislocation, unable to release his own potential, to get the feedback he deserves, with no recognition from his peers. A dislocated life is a tragedy for the individual, so walter chose the other extreme to release these repressed emotions. Became another heisenberg.
Death
The approach of death makes you especially anxious to reach your final goals. The so-called bucket list seems to turn into one last sprint, maybe only inside the pursuit of a goal can you forget the fear and pain of death closing in. Death also makes you wipe out the so-called “illusory life” of the past, to go live the part of life where the inner self was missing. Death is always far away, so it seems life can be lived any which way, and only when it comes knocking at your door do you seem to finally find out what medicine you’ve been selling in your gourd all along.
Health
Health is the thing normal people disdain the most, and it’s exactly what everyone in the hospital is willing to trade everything for, accident or illness alike. Health is the most priceless when you’re sick, and the least important when you’re not.
Self-esteem (ego)
While coming to know the world. The world serves as the coordinate system for knowing yourself, so a person’s sense of value gets tied to the world. In the first few years of life, the cognition you build always treats certain markers as exchange goods for self-esteem, not realizing that self-esteem needs nothing external to prove it, you just have to understand what you want, and go do the things you want. But people always want to control how external things unfold, so people themselves end up controlled by things, the so-called ego, under this mutual interaction, drifts away from its original meaning into something that feels like a monster. You can’t actually feel happy, it’s a sense of satisfaction that comes from the feeling of control over coincidental luck while being subject to other systems, so you come to depend on this system, and there’s no freedom left to speak of, ego is just a kind of captivity over a person.