The part that crashed me into a very deep period of depression (probably the high fever from Covid didn’t help) was realizing that this is as good as it gets.
All of our current issues are the same issues we’ve been struggling with as a species for the last several thousand years, and likely a lot longer before record-keeping was a thing. As much as we can bend the forces of nature and manipulate the material world around us with flashy machines and complex systems, we’re still irrevocably and immutably just primate animals adapted to an ice-age world of predators, and even if we had the perfect social systems with limitless resources, we would find ways to break everything because we’re just not capable of more. We are animals who stole fire from the Gods but we do not have the minds of Gods, we have selfish, malicious, fearful and anxious animal brains that make us ignore facts and logic and reason and respond only to our reactions.
It won’t be us venturing into the universe. If we ever get off this speck of dust drifting around a sunbeam, it won’t be us, it will be some descendant made of silicon and logic-gates emulating our species at some level but synthetic and who knows if it will even be aware like us… who knows if we’re even aware. We are so good at tricking ourselves we actually believe we have choice and freedom and awareness of the world around us.
Try to find the place in which your thoughts originate and you will find a chaotic realm where your brain has already made all its choices and it just wants you to feel satisfied with the explanation you think you came up with. It’s deeply distressing. Don’t actually try it.
The part that crashed me into a very deep period of depression (probably the high fever from Covid didn’t help) was realizing that this is as good as it gets.
All of our current issues are the same issues we’ve been struggling with as a species for the last several thousand years, and likely a lot longer before record-keeping was a thing. As much as we can bend the forces of nature and manipulate the material world around us with flashy machines and complex systems, we’re still irrevocably and immutably just primate animals adapted to an ice-age world of predators, and even if we had the perfect social systems with limitless resources, we would find ways to break everything because we’re just not capable of more. We are animals who stole fire from the Gods but we do not have the minds of Gods, we have selfish, malicious, fearful and anxious animal brains that make us ignore facts and logic and reason and respond only to our reactions.
It won’t be us venturing into the universe. If we ever get off this speck of dust drifting around a sunbeam, it won’t be us, it will be some descendant made of silicon and logic-gates emulating our species at some level but synthetic and who knows if it will even be aware like us… who knows if we’re even aware. We are so good at tricking ourselves we actually believe we have choice and freedom and awareness of the world around us.
Try to find the place in which your thoughts originate and you will find a chaotic realm where your brain has already made all its choices and it just wants you to feel satisfied with the explanation you think you came up with. It’s deeply distressing. Don’t actually try it.