I think I need to let that accomplishment sink in a bit. Often lately I feel I’m living partly out of spite towards those whose actions have led to where America is right now. I recently turned 32 and after taking the totality of everything going on into consideration I wanted to build a space for me to reflect on a lot of things (happiness, anger, life, anxiety, etc.) because I have little concrete documentation to show I’ve even lived and I want to change that, or at the very least try to add some humor to things as they crash around our heads. My hope is this record will stand in my place somehow after I’m gone, but I hold no illusions that it will be widely regarded. The best I can hope for is perhaps some Gen Z or whatever comes after them will happen upon it someday and consider the ramblings of a mad millennial for a time before moving on to whatever accounts for fun or work in the future. We may have Nazis again for some fucking reason but the American government is gearing up to tell us what they know about aliens, so not all is doom and gloom in 2021. Cheers to you, future person, and greetings from the wreckage of the 21st Century.
I’ve been getting really into philosophy and cosmology lately and I think it’s giving me some perspective on just how small we are, but also how we put ourselves into little arbitrary boxes. I feel I’m close to finding the lid to my box, but most days it feels like I’m only getting good at building better flashlights for the dark spaces we’ve put ourselves in, while being nowhere nearer to finding the light switch. It’s frustrating as all hell to feel close to a revelation, but to have no idea what that revelation is. I like to think the impending revelation is about who we are as beings. It’s striking me now after mediating on things big and small for so long just how amazing we as creatures are. We’re a collection of elemental molecules that unionized by sheer chance and are now in tireless pursuit of happiness, tacos, board games and sex. What right do we have to pass judgement on stardust as long as the sentience it has miraculously achieved is not hurting itself or anyone else? It’s truly maddening to watch a life that came into being by chance after its various elemental parts spent billions of years careening around the heavens until forming a sentient biological creature, only to then have that sentience choose to endlessly persecute others who are lucky enough to have made it here as well in this golden age of our species. While I in no way endorse it, in this regard, I understand religion on a logical level. We are akin to miracles with just how unlikely life is to spring up on its own. We need to be better and to collectively use our time in pursuit of productive pastimes instead of building better bombs. The universe awaits us, the cures for death and aging is within scientific reach, if only we could form a more perfect union to get there.
“The light from a galaxy is the sum of the light emitted by the billions of individual stars within it.”
-Carl Sagan, Cosmos (1980)
Be safe. Be kind. Go watch tv.
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