A question about the ending

This movie takes the unusual approach of Lester himself saying he will be dead within the year. So the whole story is what transpired to result in Lester's death. That is the arc. If he had stayed in his boring job and not rocked the boat with his family, not taken an interest in Ricky's drugs, then he would not have died. So it poses the question for each viewer, is it a better life to live safely or is it a better life to be adventurous even if it means an early death?

What is your answer, 'captain'??

..*.. TxMike ..*..

The reason he does is because he rejects the suburban lifestyle and as a result angers those who do live that lifestyle. By being his true self with no restraints, just doing what makes him happy and giving a *beep* you to anyone who resented him for it, his wife and Colonel Fitts resent him to the point of wanting to kill him and they both try to, signifying our society's rejection of people who are openly different and don't hide their abnormalities. His death also signifies his character going full circle, he starts the movie dead inside with no real enjoyment in his life and by the end he is the opposite, he is at peace with himself and dies happy. He goes from physically alive but mentally dead to mentally alive but physically dead.

He didn't "grow." He says early in his narration, "It's never too late to get it back." He simply returned to the simpler lifestyle of his happy youth. He had a year of severance pay, so he could do that, obviously not forever, but he lived long enough to get back the joy of feeling alive again.

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Essentially, Lester died happy. It was the best course of action for him. He achieved his fantasy of attracting Angela, he quit his dead-end job, and overall he just stopped being a loser. After he found out his daughter was happy and in love, his arc was done. Isn't that what we all want, to die happy?

If he had lived, the only course of action is to go downhill, because what goes up must come down. Better to die/leave while you're up.

This movie really makes Baby Boomers look like a bunch of sordidly self-absorbed a-holes who spend their time worrying about their own lives instead of trying to either make the best of it or improve their surroundings by engaging people outside of their comfort zone. Lester does indeed reject his lot in life, but takes no responsibility for what got him there in the first place; himself. It's fun to watch someone throw caution into the wind and exert their own whims at life, but that's not how real life works for a majority of humanity, so there's not much of a life lesson to this story. It didn't help either that Mendes injected the Ricky character with his misdirected detachment. I get that his father is a discipline fetishist and it drives Ricky to some deep level of subversiveness but we get nothing more out of him. In fact, I'm willing to bet he's the kinda douchebag who ends up living on the outskirts of some college town working as a bartender and writing crappy poetry while banging freshmen girls on the side.