Monday 20th Dec 2010 22:00h
This strangely obvious fact hit me like a ton of bricks Saturday night and it hasn't left me since. Like the fact that you're breathing: you know it's happening but never really notice it until you stop and think about it. It was two things, really: the fact that life is going by, and that one day it is going to end. I can watch gore videos all day long, a million violent movies, whatever, but now this thought, that has actually occurred to me a few times before, comes again: at some point in the future, I will take a breath and then not take another. I will close my eyes and they will not open. I will lose consciousness and not wake up, ever.
I know I won't even notice it happening. It'd be like the space between midnight, sometimes eleven o'clock, and around 6:50 in the morning: whatever happens between those times? I don't remember. It doesn't bother me that I don't remember. It doesn't bother me that I didn't exist for the past 14 billion years, minus 25, and that in a little bit I will go back to NOT existing for all eternity ever after.
But it's just so damn cruel, to give a being the ability to ponder that fact. I can love a million people or none, accomplish a thousand great deeds or die tomorrow in the shower. It's REALLY going to happen! Not every problem has a solution! It's the helplessness of it all. From now to the rest of my life, everything else is going to be a distraction from that truth. Logically I know that if there's nothing to be done, then it's best to set it aside. But to do WHAT?
Everything since then has been like that feeling you get when it's 9PM and you have an important paper due the next day but decide to take just "one more hour" to play video games or watch a movie or something. That growing sense of dread, that something really important is coming and what you're doing now is just wasting time. Except that important thing IS the end of all time, the end of everything, everywhere, ever. This thought is like a dull knife that's been stuck in my brain and every once in a while it gives a little twist, and I look at what whatever it is that I'm doing and wonder "what's the point"?
This strangely obvious fact hit me like a ton of bricks Saturday night and it hasn't left me since. Like the fact that you're breathing: you know it's happening but never really notice it until you stop and think about it. It was two things, really: the fact that life is going by, and that one day it is going to end. I can watch gore videos all day long, a million violent movies, whatever, but now this thought, that has actually occurred to me a few times before, comes again: at some point in the future, I will take a breath and then not take another. I will close my eyes and they will not open. I will lose consciousness and not wake up, ever.
I know I won't even notice it happening. It'd be like the space between midnight, sometimes eleven o'clock, and around 6:50 in the morning: whatever happens between those times? I don't remember. It doesn't bother me that I don't remember. It doesn't bother me that I didn't exist for the past 14 billion years, minus 25, and that in a little bit I will go back to NOT existing for all eternity ever after.
But it's just so damn cruel, to give a being the ability to ponder that fact. I can love a million people or none, accomplish a thousand great deeds or die tomorrow in the shower. It's REALLY going to happen! Not every problem has a solution! It's the helplessness of it all. From now to the rest of my life, everything else is going to be a distraction from that truth. Logically I know that if there's nothing to be done, then it's best to set it aside. But to do WHAT?
Everything since then has been like that feeling you get when it's 9PM and you have an important paper due the next day but decide to take just "one more hour" to play video games or watch a movie or something. That growing sense of dread, that something really important is coming and what you're doing now is just wasting time. Except that important thing IS the end of all time, the end of everything, everywhere, ever. This thought is like a dull knife that's been stuck in my brain and every once in a while it gives a little twist, and I look at what whatever it is that I'm doing and wonder "what's the point"?
