Almost everyone I meet is worried about the future. At what point did we start thinking about life as something that is supposed to be secure?
Spoiler alert… you’re going to experience some intense things, some you will characterize as great… others as shitty, and ultimately you’re going to die. That’s not a negative. It’s simply the way the game is designed… for the moment anyway. Recently I read about an anti-aging pill designed by seven Nobel laureates.
No thanks.
How can you pretend to any level of security when you know the end isn’t going to go your way? The very best you can do is put the whole dying thing off. But… trust me, it’s still gonna happen.
Our biggest problems come from pretending the inevitable isn’t inevitable.
We currently have two models of dying. The afterlife and oblivion.
Team afterlife believes that they will either bask eternally in the light of their god, be returned for another go around, or be loaded onto some dudes hard drive. None of those seem bad enough to warrant extended delay. (Unless the hard drive you get stuck on has strict parental locks…)
The oblivion folks think the lights go out and… that’s all folks. Which was Malia’s experience. To be completely honest, at first she wasn’t all that happy with me for giving CPR and participating in bringing her back. Not many people have to die twice.
Oh yeah, there’s also the concept of hell. A relatively recent option in the afterlife story. I’ve never actually met anyone who believes they’re going to hell, but for the sake of intellectual honesty lets say three to five percent of the people who think there’s an afterlife believe they’re going to hell. Now… if anyone has a good reason to try and put of dying, it’s these guys. Happily enough their faith offers an escape.
In other words, there’s nothing to worry about.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I’m looking forward to dying. I’m simply unwilling to slow play life. Some pack a lot of living into a few years. Others do the opposite. I prefer the former… if I have a choice.
Oh… and one more thing, from where did we get the notion that we’re so freaking important? Homo Sapiens (that’s us) have been around for maybe two hundred thousand years. There’s been trillions of us who have come and gone without barely making a ripple.
Dinosaurs roamed the earth freely for one hundred and fifty MILLION years. As I’m hoping you already know… they didn’t make it.
And… to fully round out the picture, in three or four or five billion years our sun will go kaput thus permanently ending the story of life in our solar system.
Even if Elon Musk gets us to Mars… he too will likely only be postponing the inevitable.
And so it would seem that regardless of your view on the whole thing, the only logical answer is to be a life enthusiast. To jump into the world with both feet and celebrate today.