Thoughts

Huh. Seeing as it’s been a year since I wrote anything, I figured I might as well re-stamp my mark on here.

Since no one really reads this anyway, I’ve decided to stop writing as if people are reading it and just start writing the thoughts in my head. I want to be a little more real, and take down the facade that has been a part of my previous posts. That’s not to say my previous posts have been false or lies or anything like that, but I very much put on a persona when typing them, distilling myself down to the best possible version of myself. I’m going to stop doing that. Especially since my brain often works in overdrive and I have nights–like last night–where I end up awake for 4 hours.

I’ve been thinking a lot about death recently. Or maybe a better way to put it is nonexistence, and what that would look and feel like. This also kinda works in tandem with my current interest in learning about ancient civilizations, especially Ancient Egypt, about which I am currently reading a book. Basically I often think about the people who lived back in those times, the friends and families they kept, the dinners they shared, the philosophy they debated, etc. etc. etc. And it makes me think about my own life, and the experiences I have. For the time they occur to me, they are the most important events in the world, and add color to my life. And yet, in time, they too will become ancient history, for which little evidence exists.

So does that make them any less real, or meaningful? I suppose not, since they are how I experience life. The only life I can really experience is my own (until they invent fully interactive VR, I suppose). And frankly, a huge part of the life experience that I struggle with is that it will be forgotten and erased from history. Which is kind of a silly thing to worry about, I know, since on a long enough timeline, every life lived will be forgotten and erased from history. It simply can’t last forever, that’s almost certainly impossible. But what’s daunting is that my history will last but a fraction of it, and that a hundred years from now I will live only in the memory of my children and grandchildren, should they still be alive. And in two hundred? Barring gene therapy or other medical advances that more-or-less mimic immortality, there will be no one left alive who will be able to say they knew me.

It’s both a terrifying and comforting dilemma, an ultimate yin and yang. Even if I become somehow famous enough for my name to live on beyond my life, it will soon turn into nothing but a name, the way Charles Dickens or George Washington has. Or, going back even further, to Caesar or Alexander the Great. But the people who actually know me, who remember me, who heard me speak and sing and laugh, will be gone.

Maybe those are the people I should live for, rather than the theoretical people I will never meet and have never been born.