On Life and Death
Right, so this is me being a bit of a pseudointellectual twat. Just bear with me for a blog post. You can skip over it, honest.
I believe that all living things die and that death "feels like unconsciousness" - it will be nothingness. I won't even notice I'm gone. At the same time, since I don't want to die yet (I don't fear death, I just don't feel like it right now), it chills me that one day I'm going to lose consciousness forever, and I rail against it. Though I know life is meaningless, I still ask why I was born and developed consciousness if I must inevitably lose it. At times it does look better to just die - quite apart from how I'm wasting resources just by being alive, I've also cocked up the art of living so many times I may as well just say I'm a failure and leave it there. No point in carrying on...but, strange as it seems to me, someone who's become accustomed to having no reason to live and frankly not liking it very much, I do actually have a reason or two to carry on. Oh, it's not my exams or other such shit - it's the slim possibility that somewhere, some time, someone in the world might be relying on me to do something (yay hubris!) and the reality that there are people who love me and care about me and whom I love and care about in return. (I'm not normally this sentimental, which probably gives you an indication of the effect they have on me.) So maybe things are duties to me, maybe they're obligations. Fine. They save me from falling to pieces again, which I think is more important than any subjective value judgement.
Even within a life I live to fulfil duties to others, sometimes, briefly, rarely, I have seen a sunny day when the weather's neither too hot nor too cold, when I have a lot of free time and I can wear the clothes I like and feel good about myself, when I take a good book or a journal out to the park or I spend time with the people I love, and emotions - those things I fought to keep down for so long to my detriment - surge up, and I think and feel a short sentence I never thought I'd say with meaning:
Today, I am glad to have lived.
I believe that all living things die and that death "feels like unconsciousness" - it will be nothingness. I won't even notice I'm gone. At the same time, since I don't want to die yet (I don't fear death, I just don't feel like it right now), it chills me that one day I'm going to lose consciousness forever, and I rail against it. Though I know life is meaningless, I still ask why I was born and developed consciousness if I must inevitably lose it. At times it does look better to just die - quite apart from how I'm wasting resources just by being alive, I've also cocked up the art of living so many times I may as well just say I'm a failure and leave it there. No point in carrying on...but, strange as it seems to me, someone who's become accustomed to having no reason to live and frankly not liking it very much, I do actually have a reason or two to carry on. Oh, it's not my exams or other such shit - it's the slim possibility that somewhere, some time, someone in the world might be relying on me to do something (yay hubris!) and the reality that there are people who love me and care about me and whom I love and care about in return. (I'm not normally this sentimental, which probably gives you an indication of the effect they have on me.) So maybe things are duties to me, maybe they're obligations. Fine. They save me from falling to pieces again, which I think is more important than any subjective value judgement.
Even within a life I live to fulfil duties to others, sometimes, briefly, rarely, I have seen a sunny day when the weather's neither too hot nor too cold, when I have a lot of free time and I can wear the clothes I like and feel good about myself, when I take a good book or a journal out to the park or I spend time with the people I love, and emotions - those things I fought to keep down for so long to my detriment - surge up, and I think and feel a short sentence I never thought I'd say with meaning:
Today, I am glad to have lived.
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