The title and the opening word recall Hamlet's famous soliloquy, and Jessea L. Vaughan's "To Be" joins that question mid-breath. The first word is "Or," as though we have walked into the middle of someone's argument. Then the poem quietly changes the question. It begins with the biggest choice there is, "to live / Or to die," but it cares less about which option you pick than about why you pick it. Its central claim appears twice, almost word for word: a decision is worth making only if it is made "not because you have to / But because it makes sense."
The opening is built from short lines, each a bare infinitive: exist, live, believe, love. They arrive in pairs joined by "Or," and the repeated "to" works like a drumbeat, or a coin flipped again and again. The pairs move from existence to belief to feeling. One of them is slightly odd. The opposite of "believe" would be "disbelieve," but the poem writes "question," which hints that its sympathies lie with thinking. Then comes "To decide," the first line with no "or" attached. The list of alternatives stops, and the poem turns from options to the act of choosing.
After that hinge the tone sharpens from listing to accusation. "What's the use / Of an ignorant life / Of mindless indecision" is the poem's angriest moment, and both adjectives are about the mind, about not knowing and not thinking. The word "just" then takes over: "just being / Just existing / Just living then dying." Each repetition shrinks life further, until it is only a two-step sequence, "living then dying," with nothing in between. A grammatical shift supports this. The early lines use infinitives, which name choices not yet made. The middle lines slide into -ing forms like "being" and "existing," which describe states you drift through. Even the title's verb survives only as "just being," demoted from a decision to a condition.
The last four lines loop back. "Loving or hating" returns the earlier love and hate pair, now as gerunds and now under a verdict: "all a waste." What would waste them is the same "Just" that belittled mere existence, now attached to compulsion: "Just because you have to." The final line repeats the earlier phrase "because it makes sense," so the ending rhymes with the middle by repetition rather than by sound. There is no rhyme anywhere in the poem, and the free verse is nearly unpunctuated. A single comma and the closing full stop are all we get. The poem reads like one continuous line of thought, and its only firm stop is the last one. The lines also lengthen as it goes. "Is all a waste if you do it" is the longest in the poem, as if the argument, after all that clipped pacing, finally has room to spread out.
The poem's strength is that it makes a grand, dark question practical. Most readers will never face Hamlet's literal dilemma, but all of us face smaller versions of it, such as whether we believe something because we have thought it through or because everyone around us does. Whether we love or dislike someone can also be a habit or a pressure rather than a choice. The poem's answer is plain and a little stern: a life lived on autopilot is wasted, whatever it contains.
It also leaves some things open, and that gives students something to argue about. "Makes sense" is never defined, so we are not told whose sense counts or what it is based on. Setting love and hate side by side, as though either is fine if reasoned, gives feeling a rather cool, logical treatment, and one could object that love in particular often defies sense. The poem may be asking for awareness rather than pure logic, but it does not say. That ambiguity keeps a simple-looking poem from settling into a slogan.