TOP UPDATES FOUR PILLARS CINEMA/TV GAMES MANGA/ANIME MUSIC WRITINGS FAQ LINKS
TOP UPDATES FOUR PILLARS CINEMA/TV GAMES MANGA/ANIME MUSIC WRITINGS FAQ LINKS
We live in a world today where the threat of extinction looms over our heads in all sorts of ways. We are walking a very thin and precarious tightrope. Just a few of the dilemmas we must deal with going forward are a rapidly heating climate, biodiversity loss, global overpopulation, local underpopulation, global pandemics, nuclear weapons proliferation, unregulated AI-generated misinformation, and the possibilities of future threats that are difficult to wrap our heads around but by no means merely theoretical thought experiments at this point, including engineered viruses, unaligned artificial superintelligence, and uncontrollable nanotechnology. So how do you live life and be happy when these omens of doom are everywhere?
And yet, let us also realize that we would live under the shadow of our own demise even if all these problems were solved. For we live under the shadow of our demise every second of every day. Why? Because someday we will all die. For no matter how certain some of our global catastrophes like global heating seem to be, they are still nowhere near as likely as our own individual deaths. We will all die someday. So why do we not look experience the same existential dread towards our own deaths as we do towards these other threat sources?
Certainly, we seem to have to learn this disinterest. When we are kids, we eventually learn that someday we will inevitably die. And we are mortified. We are shook to our core. It feels like anything we do to find joy or happy is deluded and irresponsible in the face of eternal annihilation. It's remarkable how well we are able to train children out of this existential dread, because we don't really have a way of convincing them that they are wrong. So what allows us to get over this dread?
I believe the answer is something that Martin Heidegger first addressed in Being and Time. We all know in a vague way that we will someday die. But we very rarely take it on as our own. We say "Everyone will die someday" or "Death comes to us all." But what this really does is ANONYMIZE death. It decenters us from recognizing death as something that is ever OUR OWN. This is a self-soothing behavior that lessens the burden of death that WE ALONE face. We never OWN our death and recognize death as something that will happen to me, myself. We say "Death comes to us all," and it seems like we are being honest and looking at death straight on. But in fact, when we do this we run away from death and refuse to take it seriously.
In fact, many of our great religions seem to be set up primarily to sustain this death-denial in increasingly subtle forms. The most obvious of these are the Christian and Isalmic faiths. Really, I would say that these religions have the most childish reception to the fear of death you could imagine. They seem like the equivalent of a child would come up with: "It's fine, I'll die and then go to a paradise where I get to bang 72 virgins and hang out with god and all my family and friends and famous cool people from history and be happy forever!!" This death-denial has such perverse excesses in its most fundamentalist forms has motivated atrocities like the crusades and suicide bombings. But make no mistake: Most of us partake in this exact same kind of evasive behavior, just in more sophisticated ways. A secular version may exalt things like the creation of a legacy so that our memory will live on beyond us. In this case, it still remains a desire to cheat death somehow and to resist the certainty of disappearance itself.
But there was one religious tradition that refused to do this. It started in India some 2500 years ago and was founded by a man named Siddhartha Gautama. And he told us that demise was constant and inevitable. Even in his part of the world that endorsed the theory of reincarnation, he refused to see it as any positive guarantee of continuity. And once you stop trying to expect it, you are liberated. Only once you accept the clear and unambiguous end of everything, you will be free.
And yet, in our daily lives we might be afraid of this acceptance. We might be afraid that feeling this deep peace and serenity in the face of danger will make us less likely to want to do anything to improve the state of the world. But it is quite the opposite. When we look face to face at our end, we can love, we can laugh, we can dance and sing. When I look into the future and see doom I ask: How do I want to live when I know I stare down oblivion? Does it change that much from when I know that I will myself someday die? Not very much. I want to love and cherish the people who mean so much to me. And I want to contribute to the communities I care about, even if they are communities that don't exist yet. Which is why I do things that I see as valuable online, whether that's making a YouTube video or updating my site. Far from feeling paralyzed and afraid to live life the way I want to, I feel all the more energized to live life in a way that is uncompromising and unapologetic, but also loving and open to the world around me.
And one question that comes up is whether or not to have children. Lots of us these days have that question. Can it be responsible to have children in a world that seems so sure to be so overcrowded and congested with carbon? I will say that I do support population control via something like reproduction licenses. This sounds scary and authoritarian at first, but I don't see a way outside of overpopulation outside of it. And I think it's one of the most humane ways to implement it. We already have restrictions on who can raise adopted children, so what is so wrong about doing it for biological children? But for now, I must say that at least right now, I do feel like I want to have children. Of course, I'm single at the moment. Cute girls in the Arctic looking for a husband, hit me up.
Can I necessarily argue that this is the most objectively responsible thing to do? No. But I do look at the people who are most in touch with nature and who live the most "sustainable" lives: small tribes in the Amazon, the Arctic, and other areas on the periphery. And most of them have children. Lots of them, in fact. Nor are they ignorant of how the climate is changing. They are usually, in fact, the mots aware of it and most immediately affected. And yet, they refuse to sacrifice on the most essential thing to safeguard in nature: the possibility of reproduction and regeneration. At some level, I think that we have to surrender to our biology here and live according to the directives of nature, which encourages us to continue. Does it seem like a hopless, bleak future? Yes. Do we feel ambivalence and fear about bringing children into a world headed on our course? Yes. But I do feel as though we should remember that this angst is not new. We have felt this way for thousands of years. And yet, we have continued to reproduce. And I, at least, can say that I am glad we did so in spite of it all. Look towards the future. Be a pillar supporting the world that is falling down around you.