Maybe Misery / Faster / Of All The Things We've Made

Screenshot from Der Untergang, 2004

You're an interesting species, an interesting mix. You're capable of such beautiful dreams and such horrible nightmares.


My mind oft races at night. For your consideration.

This is what I've seen in the four weeks since infection: people killing people. [...] Which, to my mind, puts us in a state of normality right now.

Push·Pull·Progression·Regression·Good·Evil·Dream·Division·Hug·Bludgeon
Hang·Adore·Sky Father·Fall·Respect·Hitler·Human·Hope·Redeem·Fate·Crawl
Slice·Hurt·Peak·The Bomb·Pacer·Race·Dare·Loop·End·Run

I see all this potential, and I see us squandering it. [...] We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives.

Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, 16mm film

Where past generations fought against regimes, died for ideas, dragged human life out of the gutter, and stood upright and said 'Cogito Ergo Sum'. Now, people fight obesity and die from cholesterol. Slouched on the sofa, lipsynching "You have been evicted from the Big Brother House".

When you look at the whole life of the planet, we — you know, man — has only been around for a few blinks of an eye. So if the infection wipes us all out... that is a return to normality.

They say no-one really cares about the ultimate fate of the universe because it's simply so far removed in time from ourselves. Am I the only one fretting about the meaninglessness that will be bestowed upon us when we have passed through time? Am I the only one not wasted, watching "Big Brother" (Oh, how the masses love our Orwellian future™)?

For what was our arduous march out of the trees and into modernity, if all the struggle and trials are simply an unnoticeable dot in the expanse of time and space, but the selfishness of prolonging the individual's lifespan? All meaning in ourselves is ascribed by us.

When we are gone, when all is gone, then what?

Maybe I am simply concerned that the meaningless that will be humanity also renders me meaningless - that everything I invested in, everything I thought and produced will mean zilch come heat-death. That the very matter that constitutes everything will be nothing but a cold cloud spanning the entire universe from which nothing useful may be retrieved or done. If you can really brush that off, you haven't understood.

Happy Valentine's Day.

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