Toxinebulaic
winter is coming
- Aug 2, 2023
- 25
Wouldn't it be easier to simply not exist?
I think about this every day. I think about it every time I'm alone, and so I try not to be alone. In all my efforts and struggles to mean something and avoid the thoughts, I only intensify my feelings. I only intensify the voice in my heart screaming out in agony telling me that nothing would be this painful if I simply didn't exist. It's a desire that overwhelms me. No matter what I do, it will not matter in a billion years when the universe implodes. Memories fade. When I die, I will die twice. And nobody will care.
There's one idea that always seemed stupid to me in movies, the idea of a fate worse than death. A fate worse than death? Don't you just mean life? Any amount of pain in life is infinitely worse than the absolute nothingness of death. People get scared as they approach the edge, not knowing what's on the other side. Approaching the waterfall at the end of the river, they fear that the water below is lined with spikes. What they forget is how difficult and pointless the journey was in the first place. Death isn't a curse, it's a gift. Who would want eternal life? Every depiction of a god portrays them as bloodthirsty or malicious at some point, and I can't say I don't understand. The curse of infinite life. Of immortality. No purgatory could match the sheer dread caused by the fact that we don't know where we come from, and we never will. We are utterly pointless in the grand scheme of things. That is why death is no great travesty. It allows us an escape from the ultimate doom the constantly stands right around the corner in our every day lives.
In the grand scheme of things, we will never know everything. We can try. We can pretend to know everything. But there is a reason that academics will never tell you that they know something for absolute certain. They give you probabilities and theories and "beyond a reasonable doubt" because we will never be fully aware of all of the factors that push against each and every factor of our existence. A biologist who understands evolution and all of the individual mechanics contributing to it will never be able to fully take into account the influences that a geologist is acutely aware of. We know nothing alone. And many of us are alone.
On August 6th, 1945, the world was changed forever. On August 6th, 1945, the United States of America dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Captain Robert Lewis, the bomber who dropped the weapon of mass destruction wrote in his log "My God, What Have We Done?" I think about the people who died in that explosion sometimes. One murder is tragedy. Tens of thousands of murders form a statistic. Every one of those people was important to somebody. Every one of them had a story, and none of them got to finish it. And yet... Maybe they're the lucky ones. They were incinerated in an instant. They never had the chance to feel the pain. They just died. No... Died is the wrong word. They just ceased to exist. Ceased to feel pain. Ceased to be concerned with anything. It's sad, it's terrible, nothing so cruel should every be given the honor of making it's permanent mark in the stories and books of history except to avoid its repetition. And yet... Sometimes I wish I had been in Hiroshima that day. That day before I was even born. I wish I had simply been incinerated. No pain. No struggle. Just an abrupt and easy ending to my story.
In more recent history, there was the oceangate disaster. All five passengers dead in the catastrophic implosion. An implosion so quick that they never saw it coming. An implosion so quick and deadly that they were incapable of even feeling pain as the submarine gave way and allowed the water to crush them. Tragic. Terrifying. Final. That's what everybody says. There's a massive stigma against death, and it honestly makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. A species obsessed with killing itself doesn't usually expand. And yet ours does. Not only are we painfully aware of our own mortality and lack of meaning, but some of us are psychopathic. We kill each other all the time. We kill ourselves all the time. Suicide is not uncommon, and neither is war. No creature is more dangerous to human beings than human beings. There's is nothing that threatens our existence more than ourselves. And yet we continue to exist. Psychopaths continue to derive joy from the pain and suffering of others, and the suicidal populations of the world continue to relieve themselves of their capacity to fulfill or care about their obligations. And yet we continue to exist. We are a living contradiction. Nothing hates humanity more than humanity itself. Nothing takes more human lives than humanity itself. Despite that, we continue to grow endlessly. We're like a self conscious parasite infecting earth. Spreading endlessly. Destroying everything that gets in our way. Exploiting every resource at our disposal.
By every metric, humanity has done so much more to destroy it's planet than it has attempted to improve and repair it. The constant exploitation without regard for its results has lead to a population that is obsessed with seizing any possible advantage to get a leg up on the competition. Those advantages could be anything. More efficient machinery, ease of use, effective marketing. It could also be the intentional destruction of one's moral compass, and a consistent effort to ignore anything that might trigger what remains of it. We don't just exploit the world we live in, we exploit each other. And make no mistake, the world is not what's at risk here. The world will forget us soon enough. We pose no threat to earth. Maybe the animals and plants of our time, but those will evolve and go extinct and disappear from memory soon enough. Reduce the world to a flaming ball of rocks again, and life will return to it again. Earth has the ingredients, it only needs half a million years. We can rest easy knowing that in a few short millions of years, we will be nothing. Nothing will remember us, because there will be nothing to remember us. Our space probes will be long gone. Our attempts of self preservation will have failed. So don't make the mistake of thinking we have to save the planet. We aren't saving the planet. We're saving ourselves, and our enjoyment of a planet. A planet that doesn't need us
So we exploit each other, and that is the true tragedy, because where the earth will regrow, we will not. Why can't we just be nice to each other and respect one another, share resources? Once the fire that is humanity runs out of fuel, it will disappear. Once our host dies, we will die with it. We are important to ourselves, and ourselves alone. And yet... There is nothing that brings me more peace than that. It's relieving. Don't you feel the same way? Every bad thing you ever did, every idiotic decision, every painful choice you ever made will be erased from the record. All you have to do is wait. And you won't feel the time go by, because you won't exist. Time has no meaning in the abyss of nothingness. A second might as well be a million years and a nanosecond. Both would have the exact same amount of impact on your conception of time after your eventual demise.
No more waiting. No more stress. No more hate. No more love. No more night. No more day.
Maybe you see that as throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Honestly, I agree with you. There are some things to enjoy about this world! That's why I'm not dead right now. There are things to live for, and reasons to be happy. I realize that, and I'm thankful. I just take solace in the fact that at the end of the road, I will have lived only for myself and others. Nothing else matters because it will all fade. Death is not something I wish to give myself. Sometimes I think of suicide as cheating. Death is the ultimate reward for living. Life is a game, and it's the only game I'll ever get to play. That's why I accept that it will end, but don't want to bring that end upon myself prematurely. It's not the destination, it's not the reward, it's the journey you took to get there.
I say that, but ultimately, even a bit of optimism won't end up mattering. None of this will end up mattering. And you know the great thing about the idea that nothing will end up mattering?
I don't think it matters.
So we exploit each other, and that is the true tragedy, because where the earth will regrow, we will not. Why can't we just be nice to each other and respect one another, share resources? Once the fire that is humanity runs out of fuel, it will disappear. Once our host dies, we will die with it. We are important to ourselves, and ourselves alone. And yet... There is nothing that brings me more peace than that. It's relieving. Don't you feel the same way? Every bad thing you ever did, every idiotic decision, every painful choice you ever made will be erased from the record. All you have to do is wait. And you won't feel the time go by, because you won't exist. Time has no meaning in the abyss of nothingness. A second might as well be a million years and a nanosecond. Both would have the exact same amount of impact on your conception of time after your eventual demise.
No more waiting. No more stress. No more hate. No more love. No more night. No more day.
Maybe you see that as throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Honestly, I agree with you. There are some things to enjoy about this world! That's why I'm not dead right now. There are things to live for, and reasons to be happy. I realize that, and I'm thankful. I just take solace in the fact that at the end of the road, I will have lived only for myself and others. Nothing else matters because it will all fade. Death is not something I wish to give myself. Sometimes I think of suicide as cheating. Death is the ultimate reward for living. Life is a game, and it's the only game I'll ever get to play. That's why I accept that it will end, but don't want to bring that end upon myself prematurely. It's not the destination, it's not the reward, it's the journey you took to get there.
I say that, but ultimately, even a bit of optimism won't end up mattering. None of this will end up mattering. And you know the great thing about the idea that nothing will end up mattering?
I don't think it matters.
