And then she died and we're still here; dealing with a bunch of assholes not caring about what happens to the world after they die.
And then she died and we're still here; dealing with a bunch of assholes not caring about what happens to the world after they die.
I don't know if I'd blame a fear of mortality or desire to escape death on egoist thought or capitalism. Silicon valley transhumanism may be what that desire looks like through the filter of hyper-atomized neoliberalism, but like the Epic of Gilgamesh for example is a lamentation on the inevitability of death and it predates both capitalism and modern conceptions of the individual. The cosmist movement, which took on an explicitly socialist character after the establishment of the USSR, also often extolled the idea of eventual freedom from physical decay and death.
Growing old sucks. Dying sucks. We should find out how to not do those things.
boo, no. Accept your nature as a mortal and see growing old and dying as privileges.
Death as an idea is fucking paralyzingly terrifying. I have no idea how people live while recognizing it.
I really like the lyric "But I'm chilled by the redundancy of Thoughts collected, but not kept". What the fuck is the point of all this if we cease to exist uncertain day? Why deal with this bullshit at all? I honestly look around me sometimes and have to wonder: "What the fuck?"
Like what even is the true nature of reality? Why did we suddenly just blip into being to have this experience? I don't remember being born or there ever being a time I didn't exist, so the idea that one day it just stops is beyond surreal. It's maddening. I have to avoid thinking about it because I start freaking out. I was raised Catholic but it wasn't the torment that freaked me out, it's the idea of eternity. I can't even conceive of that. Even from a hardcore materialist standpoint, eternal non existence after having only known existence is like, what the fuck.
Maybe this isn't all there is? I was freaking out really badly about this once and I was in my living room and I felt myself almost detach from this world and my mom and brother were talking and it suddenly felt really alien and unfamiliar but also like I knew what it was but just didn't really have a connection to it anymore...like there was a tether being cut.
I've heard a lot of NDE's tend to be like that, a feeling of bliss and confusion as you leave something familiar behind to go somewhere incomprehensible.
I should try DMT
Well that's the great paradox of death innit? If death destroys your memories (or at least the memory centers of your brain) then it doesn't just erase your present or future but your past as well.
Yet here we are, existing in the past of a future where this past has been, from our perspective, destroyed. So how's that work?
the past is not defined by your idea of it. The hours I slept during still passed and are part of my past yet I can in no way recall them. You're just a function of the universe, and not a permanent one. Some rocks collected, in such a way as to move and think, and eventually lost one of those abilities and then the other. If there is a soul, then it goes somewhere or gets turned into something. If there is not, then the rocks just lay down and stop occupying the form they once did.
Oh I don't believe in a personal soul or a static, essentialized "self." I just think it's strange that we can experience anything when the organ responsible for recording our experiences will inevitably decay. Everything we experience is essentially a memory after all. It's like if you made a home movie, but then showed no one, burned the tape, scattered the ashes across three states and drank yourself into forgetting you ever made it. Sure, if you had an ominscient viewpoint you can say the movie technically existed, but can you say the same from your own perspective that no longer remembers ever making it?
depends on whether or not we are saying there is an objective reality. If there is, then the film did exist. If there is not, then the film does not exist, as it did not significantly change any observer's experience and left no record. I believe in a soul which will arrive in an afterlife, but an also sometimes alarmed at the prospect the library of my knowledge and experiences will disappear, and, if my faith is wrong, there is no other form of it except what I impart to others. I hope to do things which will be remembered for many generations, but know this too will eventually erode into oblivion. I think of my life as a good meal, which is just as good if one person eats it as it is when eaten by a great party.