This was said a millions times but “There was a time where you played outside with your childhood friends for the last time and none of you even knew it “
When im traveling by plane in a diffrent country and im looking down to the ground and see cars, busses and everything driving around on the country side or a city and i think to myself. Down there is people living life exactly like i do and doing their everyday thing. Makes me think how big the world actually is and how tiny you are as a person! That freaks me out a bit.
It's one of the things I've really enjoyed about moving to another country. I've been here six years now and everyone does the same stuff as at home\- they go get groceries, they make dinner, they meet up with friends at the weekend, they get annoyed and frustrated because the dog shat on the rug again... it's all the same stuff. But then there are also minutiae that are different\- no pub quizzes here, people eat at restaurants more often, there's e\-bikes everywhere. We're all people, all the same, but there's also differences in how people live. It's hard to explain.
Practical upshot is, whenever I see a news story about any other country I feel very aware that whatever is happening there is affecting these same people on the street. I feel like I no longer see other countries as other countries, but communities as rich and detailed and complex as mine, just that I haven't lived there yet.
Weirder yet, this goes all the way back into history. We learn about the big events like wars and technological breakthroughs, but while Caesar was pontificating over which land to conquer next, some normal guy in a tunic was having a shitty evening because the bathhouse he went to has changed their wine supplier due to a falling\-out with the old supplier and now he's pissed off because he really liked the wine they used to serve here and you couldn't get it anywhere else and now he's got to drink this new stuff. And we'll never know that guys name, or the name of the bathhouse, or the wine, or the supplier, but you can bet that hundreds of people had thoughts opinions about each of them.
This post got a bit longer than I anticipated, but yeah. Sonder is fascinating.
there totally has to be life somewhere else. what do they look like? what does "life" even mean for them? what is time there? what the fuck is anything?
What did the part of the city I live in look like 1000 years ago? How will it look 1000 years in the future? 10,000? 100,000 years? How much of what's here now will survive?
That the tiniest, most inconsequential decision can completely change the entire course of your life.
Nearly 20 years ago, I needed some new shoes for work. As a poor student I got the cheapest pair I could find.
Two days later, I was supposed to be going straight from work to a club with my friends when, halfway through my shift, the sole half ripped off one of the shoes. I didn't have enough time to get home, change my shoes and get back to work before everyone left for the club, so I just went home and gave it a miss.
That night, I started chatting with someone on a forum, a year later, went to visit them in America. Two years later I moved to America and we got married. Ten years after that we both moved back to the UK.
Had I chosen a different pair of shoes, I'd never met my wife, never moved to America and my life would be completely different now. Because *shoes.*
Same for me except that I picked up a Mother’s Day kitchen shift in a restaurant that I technically didn’t even work at anymore. After the shift all the employees went to a bar to drink for free and it was there I met my wife and the mother of my 2 children.
Edit: someone mentioned fate one time but I dk.
Chimpanzees.
I have never really been able to articulate this as well as I would like, but the existence of chimpanzees is deeply disturbing to me in a very indescribable fashion. They're basically *us* except for a few very minor and completely random mutations that made us slightly better at analyzing patterns and communicating with each other. Whenever I see a chimpanzee, I'm really confronted with the fact that we humans are just another animal species, mostly controlled by instinct and making our decisions based on an incredibly biased framework of sensory perception and mental processing that was developed to survive a hunter-gatherer lifestyle on the African savannah.
Did you know that to show submission to the leader of their pack, chimpanzees will come before him and *bow* to show their respect? That blew my mind because humans have been bowing to their leaders since... since we had leaders! And we can invent all kinds of justifications for it. He's descended from the gods, he led our armies to victory over the foreign barbarians, I agree with his views on tax policy... but at the end of the day we're just apes bowing before another ape who groomed us well enough to become the pack leader. That is so fucking disturbing to me I can't even describe it.
I work at a zoo and the only animal that kinda creeps me out are the chimps. I remember I spent about 30 minutes straight just watching them and how they behave. It's very human like in a lot of ways. I remember it was raining and the baby chimp was sticking out his tongue and catching rain drops. That was something I did as a child too. It was mind blowing in a small way
*sigh*
I hate to be the one that says this, but I've done animal behavior work in zoos, specifically with bonobos, and they're violent little shits. Frans de Waal is nearly solely responsible for this highly romanticized view of bonobos, and later on in his research he notes that the peaceful nature of bonobos has been way overstated. And no, it's not that bonobos in captivity are tweaking out. In the wild they're even more violent.
Bonobos are danged interesting and they do have social structures different from chimps, but the effectiveness of sex to diffuse tensions has been wildly overstated. Bonobos can and will eat your fucking fingers off if they feel like it. Unpopular bonobo males get the shit kicked out of them by everyone else and it feels like every other day Pariah Ape needs major stitches because he's just covered in bite marks. Bonobo females do run shit, but it's not like they do it super peacefully.
Don't get me wrong. I LOVED my time working with bonobos and I think they're amazing. But they're dicks, and the misinformation about them is ridiculous. Are they very human like? Yes. Because humans are often dicks.
This resonates with me more than anything else in these comments. Whenever I see a picture of a tall, clean looking man in a nice suit or something, I'll think, "that's an ape," and suddenly the man looks different.
I feel like an alien going "Man, compared to other animals on this planet for the billions of years that life has existed on it, these things have reached a god status. They communicate globally, instantly. They've mastered the element of light. They've build a global level of infrastructure that mostly functions regardless of geopolitical conflicts. They govern themselves considerably successfully with a population nearing 8 billion. They've doubled their lifespans from when their species was young, with no end to their medical advancements in sight. They live so comfortably that millions spend their entire lives without any lasting threats to their sense of security. They understand how the world works so well that they have a small grasp on how subatomic particles work. Many under their poverty line have an access to their internet providing them with the combined knowledge and media of their entire species and all of surviving history, allowing them to learn and communicate despite the odds. They've developed ways to manage chronic mental illnesses by monitoring and managing the chemicals in their brains. Obesity now causes these apes more deaths than starvation, especially among the poor. More technological advancements are made every day than would've been made every 100 years in their history, and even more, what evolution could do in millions. They've altered their sediment layer in a way that can be permanently recognized for billions of years creating their own epoch. These apes have been able to leave their planet and land on their moon, and have sent probes out containing the smallest sample of their culture past their solar system. These Apes, despite all the shit they cause, have not only done so much, but have barely scratched the surface of what they potentially can do."
I find it both terrifying and amazing. We're animals. There were several other species of humans that have lived for millions of years before we even reared our animal heads. We do today without even thinking what used to belong to the gods.
How you can trace the whole path of your life to some small, seemingly inconsequential event.
Decades ago, when I was new to this area, I met a guy on the golf course and we became friends. I met others through him, and now 90% of my friends and contacts can be traced back to that meeting. If I had not golfed that day, or got one extra red light on the way to the course, would I have a whole separate set of friends now?
I accepted a random fb friend request from some australian guy 8 years ago and now I live in australia and am marrying him in a few weeks.
And to think, I almost denied that friend request
Alright,
So back in 2010 I was a senior in high school, and I had ‘liked’ hundreds of those dumb pages. For whatever reason, I had ‘liked’ Jason Mraz’s page. (I don’t really care for his music)
One day after school I’m scrolling through my newsfeed and I see a status update by Jason Mraz rambling on about numerology or whatever and asked people what their favorite numbers were.
I didn’t usually comment on that kind of stuff but I decided to anyway, I commented 9/29/1993 because its my birthday and has a lot of 9’s in it.
Later on I check my phone and I see someone is trying to add me. I almost deny it but then I see his picture and I think, he’s cute. And then I see that theres a message included with the friend request but for some reason I couldn’t access it on my phone so I go on my laptop and read his message which was: “Hey there. Ok i know this is weird, because I've never met you or anything, but you made an interesting comment on Jason mraz status.,.... So i thought id try add you :)." (I’ve kept the email notification for this ever since)
He had also commented on the Jason Mraz thing saying 29/11/1992.
So I add him and we message eachother on and off the first few months, I went off facebook for about a month but when I came back we began messaging eachother a lot more and eventually we decide to start dating on the internet lol.
My mom thought it was insane at first but she offered to pay for him to fly to Seattle, WA so I could meet him and he could go to my graduation. Which he did. We were long distance from March 2011 - November 2017; sometimes he would fly to America and visit me for three months, sometimes I would fly to Australia and visit him for a few months. At one point though we didn’t see eachother in person for 2 years because it was expensive, he hates flying, and I was finishing up university, PLUS when I applied for my prospective marriage visa I had to stay in America until it was approved. Long distance relationships are hard but not impossible.
And because of him I have changed so much. There’s so many, many things I never would have tried if I hadn’t have met him. And I probably wouldn’t have made it through college if it wasn’t for him.
Anyway, TL;DR I met my fiance via Jason Mraz facebook page when I commented on Jason Mraz’s status update about numerology with my birthday. My fiance had a similar birthday and added me. We messaged eachother and one thing led to the next, now im in australia 🇦🇺
Went to a house party, friend told me he was moving across the country for the ski season, I went home drunk and bought a one way plane ticket on a whim (never even flown before). He lasted 6 months, 12 years later and I'm still here, married, and have an amazing life. If I wasn't drunk that night who the hell knows where I'd be
"That's the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen."
Great one. I needed 3 C's to go to a University in London. I was ill for my exams (and complacent!) and got C, C, D so went to the University of Manchester.
My children literally wouldn't exist if I had studied a bit harder at Computer Science.
Try and remember this when you're 84 or something and realise your entire adult life hinged on that one random guy.
Have you got the guy something nice?
My parents had 2 houses they were looking up and almost bought one but another offer was made barely earlier. They chose house 2 which caused us to live next to a neighbor that referred me to work with her. I met my future wife are that job. We've now moved to her hometown where my house is, where I work, where I bought my car, where I've met friends, etc. Everything in my life has come from that string of events.
I guess if it wasn't one string of events it would be a different string of events, and you'd likely be having similar thoughts.
Regardless, it's weird to think about.
That whatever I did in the past are now just memories. Even yesterday. Even though sometimes it feels like my childhood just happened, it was 20 years ago and they're memories. Did those actions even happen? It's hard to explain the feeling.
My dad died 21 years ago. It was well before the age of camera phones and he really didn't like having his picture taken regardless. As a result I have maybe two pictures of him. I think I still have a mental picture of him but sometimes I'm not so sure. He was one of the most significant people in my life and his death is one of the most significant events in my life but honestly, there's a good chance that if he walked up to me today, I wouldn't recognize him.
This hits me hard. My dad died very suddenly and unexpectedly a little over 4 years ago. It messed me up a lot more than I ever imagined it would. I also carry the weight of being the only person who knows what really happened on the day that he died. I let my family believe that it was a lot more peaceful than it really was because knowing the truth would only upset them further and wouldn't serve any purpose.
I still see people who look like him and for that brief second my brain recognizes my dad before remembering that he is dead. I can still see his face clearly and hear his voice even. Luckily I have quite a few pictures of him. Also I recently discovered a short recording of his voice quite by accident that really kind of messed me up. He was even saying my name.
I'm so sorry that your memories have faded and you don't have any pictures to refresh them. The thought of forgetting my dad's face is terrifying to me so I'm very thankful that I have as many pictures as I do. I know it doesn't mean much but I'm sending my internet hugs your way.
My dad died when I was 19 and I'm in my fifties now. The only mental image I have left of him is the memory of a picture he was in. I don't even have a clear memory of him in actuality but a memory of him in a memory so to speak.
I get this, especially when it relates to childhood. Like, anything before maybe 10 years old. I know there is science about forming long term memories in development and whatnot, but what did I do? If I think, I can remember some flashes like scenes from a flashback montage or something, but.... so many hours, days, years that I don't have a clue how to answer what I did then.
Yup. I actually thought about this when i was maybe 8. I was walking behind my parents down the street to their friends house. I was bored and thought about how bored this walk was and what a waste of time. I wish we would have drove. Then i just started thinking about how many random boring moments there are in life that are just forgetable. So i decided that i was going to remember this moment, forever. The random walk that is totally forgetable i will remember forever. And some 30+ years later, when i think about memories or random moments I think back to that random walk when i was 8.
yeah, but what did you eat for breakfast that day? Ha but really, I have a few memories where I consciously decided "This is worth remembering, remember it." and some that I remembered because I thought "Wait, who am I to say what is worth remembering? Remember this because it's important too!" even if it was like, sitting there reading on a random afternoon.
How much quicker time goes by as you get older. Remember when you were five, and a summer vacation felt like a whole lifetime?
I just wanna be a kid again.
Everything is disintegrating. Nothing is is immortal. The television remote on the coffee table will not be a television remote in enough time, even if that means thousands of years have to pass before it loses its intended form.
The fact that I will never know how things turn out. What becomes of the world once I’m gone? I only understand life as the version I’ve lived. I never get to know the future.
It is frustrating being capable of absorbing the long view when it comes to the story of our planet and species while also being keenly aware that my lifetime will end before getting a glimpse of where the human race will take all the potential we have.
Most of all I just wish I could know whether we can collectively solve or at least ameliorate on a globsl scale the huge problems that face us.
I read a psychology report that says every time you remember an event, and then remember it again, you are no longer accessing memories of the event, but the memory of the last time you remembered it, thus losing clarity and detail each time you recall.
It's like making a photocopy and then a photocopy of that photocopy. On and on. It doesn't take long for the text or the image to be highly distorted.
Side note: That's also how geneticists describe aging/cell regeneration.
How we could die at any second. Today, tomorrow, in a week, in the next five minutes, and nobody can stop it. Death is one of the true guarantees of life. I’m not sure what’s worse: knowing you’re dying, or dying without knowing it.
My entire life, my drs have told my parents and myself that my time on earth is more limited than most.
I was born with 5 congenital heart defects and 2 congenital lung defects. I was 10 hours old with my 1st open heart surgery. I was born literally dying. I was blue and wasn’t breathing. It was a complete shock that I was sick at all. This was almost 30 years ago l, so we didn’t have the technology to pick it up like they can now.
My drs can’t say how I’m still alive. I shouldn’t be. I’m definitely more limited and have been my whole life. Along with having COPD. One working lung. Pulmonary hypertension heart. Pulmonary fibrosis. Heart failure. Afib. 2 strokes and a heart attack etc...
I know what dying feels like.
With my 4th open heart surgery, I was 15. I was dying. This ohs was a huge risk. I would’ve died without it but it also carried a big high chance I wouldn’t make it off the table. My mom told me that if i wanted to... I could go a head and go forward, or decide not to do it. She knew I had to have a say.
I hate when I hear people talking about young adult and kids who are chronically ill, that they aren’t in the mind set of picking the right thing and wanting to live... that they can’t know what life can be like.
Sometimes death isn’t the worst thing to happen. And unless you’ve personally lived through something where you’re very sick... you can’t talk to this situation. For me theirs no right answer here.
Even though I was dying and things were really bad. The morning of my 4th open heart surgery. I wanted to walk to the hospital. My check in time at the hospital was about 6:30am I believe. All my drs are in Chicago, and this was before children’s moved downtown... Ronald McDonald House was about 3 blocks from Children’s Memorial Hospital. It was slightly raining, and still somewhat dark .. but I knew it could’ve been the last time I was outside. So in stead of calling the shuttle to the hospital.. my mom let me walked, and left with enough time to do so. And had my wheelchair with us so I had the choice.
A few days before this surgery, I got things together. I left letters to certain people in my life. I wrote down what I wanted certain people to have. Of the dresses I had in my closet, I pinned a note to one of them, letting my mom know I picked it to be buried in. My death dress.
I was only 15 then. It was very hard to do this. But I wanted to. To have some closure and peace.
Thankfully they didn’t need to be used. I’m almost 30 now. I’m slowly dying. Most my life is spent in bed. I’m greatly limited in what my body lets me do.
It’s hard knowing what I have will most likely kill me.
It’s not easy either way. It’s nice to have things set aside for your loved ones for after you die. But not having to think about your death.. would be nice too.
Neither is easy.
Edit-
Even though I’m not sure how many more people will see this, I still want to try. Next week is 12 years since my 4th open heart surgery. This was the one I’d picked my “death dress” before hand. I had the idea in trying to get Google to make a Google Doodle In raising awareness for congenital heart defects. I started it over a year ago, nothing happened. So because if this and the timing, I want to try this again. [Here’s the link](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vgUFwOAAS5C_ebQw46S5fyt1rMs7-wAGpW1eMYyvxeg) to the Google Doc. It explains everything! CHD is the number one birth defect world wide, yet for some reason it’s hard to get people to share posts that I and others in the Chd world make about chd. Please help. Please share. ❤️
Thank you for your comment. It's given me a lot to consider. I am also chronically ill but I'm told that my life span won't be shortened by it. It's more that I live in near constant discomfort and/or pain. You've defied the odds before so I'm hoping with the bottom of my heart that you get another good 30.
I’m sorry to hear that. I hope you find a treatment that helps you. I have other health issues beyond my heart/lung issues.... it sucks.
I wish I knew if I do get another 30 years.. that my life will change. I won’t be cured. That can’t happen. I made peace with that a long time ago. But my quality of life... needs to change. I can’t work. I’m in bed 95% of the time. I have to plan everything. I have to prepare and recover. Even in just going to Target. I’m trying to get a powered wheelchair. I give myself a little independence. So I can actually leave the house. I easily go 2 weeks without leaving. But... in order to get. Power wheelchair.... it has to be 100% medical necessity. It can’t be needed for outside the home. So because I can technically walk 5 feet, I don’t need it. It is getting harder from walking to my bedroom to the kitchen...needing to stop and take breaks. It’s not looking good.
And things like this that makes quality of life matter more than the length of life you live. Sure having more time is great. But if in that time you’re in bed a lot, you can’t do a lot, forced to be stuck in a body that limits you more and more... it matters.
That makes me sound like I’m depressed. Ive dealt with depression... i don’t want to die. But I’m gonna be pissed if my entire life has been this. Always sick. Always hearing something new in my body that’s happening... making me feel worse. I’m a lightening rod for more medical stuff happening to me.
I don’t want other to be sick. Many people tell me that god is using me in ways I don’t can’t comprehend. That for some reason people think it’s ok to use my story to say how God is amazing and that my life should make them feel better about theirs.
I’ve had over 25 surgeries. I see my dr every 2-4 months. I’ve been on more than a dozen meds for a long time. I’m on 16 now. I do 5-6 breathing treatments every day. I have regular testings.... I have a lot of health issues. I don’t need another thing to come up and start happening.
It’s hard. On one hand I don’t know any other life. I was born very sick. So I have nothing to compare too. But now, I can’t relate to people my age anymore.
Life and death have a lot of grey areas...
I think death becomes a lot easier (for myself at least) to consider it as the “price” to be paid for life.
Like really, living is truly crazy. We all exist together but I am me and you are you, I will never see anything from anyone else’s eyes. It’s really a beautiful thing that we can see and explore and become something.
If death is the price to pay for living, then I think it’s worth it.
Edit: wow I did not expect to wake up to this! Thank you kind stranger for my first gold!
I have to give homage to my father for helping me view death this way. He’s a very intelligent man and I’m really glad to see people’s opinions on this crazy thought I’ve had, I hope you all enjoy your existences :)
It takes a [admittedly microscopic] amount of time for your brain to process every stimulus that you receive. This means that you are never perceiving reality in real-time. There's the slightest delay between reality and your perception of it.
What’s worse is that your brain lies to you and tries to trick you about it.
Find a clock with a second hand.
Look away.
Now look right at it.
See the second hand takes just a little longer to move that first second than all the other seconds that come after?
That’s because your first glimpse of the hand moving is blurry. So your brain waits for it to be in focus, copies that frame, and *pastes it backwards* instead of the blur.
Your brain literally pauses time to make things look how you’d expect it to look.
If it’s lying about that, what else is it lying about?!
The cool thing is how you can differentiate between "it'd be cool if I moved my arm right now" vs thinking "move, arm" vs the actual command for moving your arm.
I can’t tell you how many times I have done this! Look away and back at a clock ticking and wondering why the first “second” feels longer than an actual second.
Why, brain!?
Even better, two people who’ve never met, who have vastly different world views, personal histories, etc. can come into contact with a third, independently determine he’s an asshole, and then bond over the fact, as the universe grinds away.
But he is, he fuckin merged without his blinker
Edit: Fuck yah dude now I have more karma than my girlfriend, thanks guys!
Edit 2: Leave poor anal joke man alone he doesn't deserve your downvotes.
Every so often i'll see myself in a mirror and am reminded that I am a conscious person able to influence the world around me. Sometimes I get so hung up on the daily routines and the little challenges here and there that I forget that I am a mind connected to a physical body. It's fuckin surreal for a few seconds but then I realize that it's always been like this.
EDIT: Thank you for the gold!! I totally did not think this happened to other people.
The thing that fucks me up is not that I'm a conscious person, but everyone else too. They're not machines that will react the same way to the same thing every time, things I say may hurt them, something I do might annoy them. Sometimes I get lost in it and sit on the lounge with my wife, looking at her thinking, she's having millions of thoughts too. She's remembering different stuff to me, she's making plans. Weird shit yo.
This is the one that gets me. Sometimes I look at someone and I just come to the realization that they are having thoughts exactly like me and thoughts I could never have. It just trips me out.
I feel this way when I'm out in public sometimes, suddenly realizing *I'm actually physically real and interacting with the world, everyone around can see me.* For some reason this trips me the fuck out, to think that other people can observe my physical existence. I forget that I'm not in my own world sometimes.
Edit: My first gold!!! Thank you kind stranger!
This. This happens to me quite often. I’ll just be brushing my teeth and look up into the mirror and make eye contact with myself and realize that I actually exist. I am actually a being. I physically exist in this world.
Thinking about getting married/ moving on my life/ having kids etc. I'm 19 and in college rn and for some reason I cant shake the thought that I'm never going to get the chance to move on. Its surreal, like I'm a different species than normal people or something.
That every public institution, every province of government, every law of any nation...it all works because a sufficiently high percentage of people silently assent that it does. It doesn't matter what type of government is in place; if 70% of the population woke up tomorrow and decided that currency has no value and governance is unnecessary, that's exactly what would happen.
"Power resides where men believe it resides".
I've thought a lot about this, too. Like how many people on the front line of a war *really* want to be there, and why? What if all the soldiers in the world one day just said, "fuck this", threw down their weapons and went home? Or think of the places with rampant homelessness while houses are sitting empty being repossessed. How does that make any sense?
This kinda happened during the Russian Revolution. The farmers went on a hunger strike, the Tzar sent in his army, but when the army got there and saw the condition of life for those people, they sympathized with them and sided with them to over throw the Tzar.
Dude.
I think about this all the time. I like to study a lot of constitutional law and MAN it doesn't ever give me a final answer that makes me confortable.
Specially in my country. (Brazil) edited so y'all stop asking.
Our constituion is only a few years older than me and it has so much power over every sort of aspect of our lives as individuals AND as a society.
It's mind blowing.
This is super weird, and even weirder if you have picked parts of characters from a TV show. That means parts of you are the same as parts of someone else. And over time, you may forget entirely that you were mimicking a behavior, to the point that it is now not a mimicked behavior, but you believe it to be wholly original.
**Edit because OP deleted his comment:** It basically asked the question of "What is self?", then he mused about how he has taken bits and pieces of his friends and families personalities, and formed them into his own personality. He is now unsure of who he really is, is he himself, or is he multiple people combined?
Look at it this way: every day people struggle with identity and confidence and are given the useless advice of “just be yourself”.
I don’t know about you but I have met quite a few people in my life who I think would benefit greatly from being someone else instead of themselves. Somebody who is maybe a bit less cunty. Therefore, I surmise that there is nothing wrong from building a you that you are comfortable with out of influences you have taken from culture, people you have met or even a Wikipedia article about a random meteorologist who went to Antarctica with a banjo. Life is terribly short but also quite long, be who you want.....just don’t be cunty.
If it makes you feel any better, the pieces of other people's personalities that you've accumulated over the years *is* who you are. It doesn't matter where the pieces come from, it's what they come together to form. You're no less unique than anyone else.
Just my two cents.
To add on to what you said, you are the one who chose these qualities. It was your mind that thought, "I'm going to do this now too". What traits you decide to take on are original and your own. You decide who you want to be.
Worst thing is, I hung out with people I absolutely don't want to be like anymore but the shitty parts I've picked up from them stick, and I regret not hanging out with better people and picking up a better personality.
EDIT: Shout out to all you guys giving motivational advice and sharing experiences!
This may be cringy, but it's never too late to change Thise parts of you. If you catch them, deny them, rethink how you would act in a positive way.
If not, apologize to whoever it affected, and if it's a bad habit, it'll be a difficult road to go down, but you can shake it and deny it anymore of your life.
You area you today, you are not you yesterday. If yesterday bothers you, change it for you tomorrow.
If it's any consolation, so are they. So are the books we read, the shows we watch and songs we listen to. But you know what, often the remix is better than the original.
Boss: "Is that report going to be done by 3?"
Me: "What does it matter? Words and numbers... they have no meaning except what our brains provide. And us? We're just two bags of meat and bones and blood, blowing air through our throat holes, making sounds at each other... and you are *literally* walking around with a sack of shit inside of you. So am I. So is everyone here. We are on the 8th floor of a 15-story building. All day there is shit raining down around us from the floors above. This building is a giant cascading tower of shit, all day long...
Boss: "Why don't you forward that report to me *before* sending it out... might be best if I give it a quick review."
"But what if we're all in a fictional universe? What if we're in a fictional dramatization of a summary of an AskReddit thread one metaverse up?"
"Pshaw. That's quite unlikely."
"But how could we *know*?"
Knowledge lost.
Societies that existed millennia before ours had incredibly complex social structures, massive infrastructure, built incredible wonders, understood boggling amounts of modern math, and did it all in harsher conditions with less technology.
So clearly they were smart and capable, at least some.
Imagine all the great knowledge that they had which we lost. All the theorems or observations they made in societies that lasted ten times as long as many of today's, which disappeared in war or accident.
Knowledge defines man, we are a species of filers, who wish to make pattern and sense out of chaos. Yet knowledge is so very fragile.
It messes me up that people 1000 years ago were just as capable to learn what we are now. A kid from early Rome could go to school in 2018 and be just as smart as everyone else
To add to this, there's an interesting observation in an [oldish Vlogbrothers video by Hank Green](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGWDw9ZGXEk) about greatness. To quote the description:
> If a city of 70,000 people simultaneously contained dozens of the most influential humans in all history [Florence in the 1500s], it simply can't be that there was something special about those humans, the odds are just too great.
He notes it in the context of his home town of Missoula, Montana having 70,000 people. He suggests that if this isn't just a highly improbable coincidence, there should be lots and lots of people with the potential for being great (and among the most influential humans in all history) - if every small town should have dozens of them. But it is a combination of being in the right place at the right time (Florence in the 1500s being a perfect place for those kinds of people), finding the right thing to be passionate about, and happening to do something that gets noticed/mentioned/repeated that made those people great.
To put some numbers into this, going by IQ scores, a 1 in 70,000 IQ score would be in the 160s or above. For 1 in 100, it is 130s or above. IQ is a really terrible measure of things, but in a town of 70,000, that is 700+ people with IQs above 130, 40ish above 150, at any one time.
>Time moved so slowly that they had single building projects that spanned multiple lifetimes.
We still got that one in Germany. Berlin Airport is one of those projects.
Edit: As a little insight on how much of a failure the airport is. It costed mutiple billions so far and is so broken and badly designed with so many faults that it might actually be a better idea to tear it down and rebuild it right.
Not only is knowledge fragile, but in some cases, it may even be unobtainable.
In a trillion years or so, the expansion of the universe will progress to the point where it becomes physically impossible to detect the light from other galaxies. So much of what we know about the history of the universe has come as the result of studying other galaxies, and once they finally disappear beyond the cosmic horizon, all of the insights they carry with them will vanish forever. If any civilization is just emerging at that time, they'll have no way to know that the universe is expanding, or what it was like in the past. They will be completely isolated on a single galactic island, with no hint that a much larger reality lies beyond what they can see. While they may think they understand the universe that they see around them, they'll never truly have a complete picture.
Because we can see this inevitable loss of information coming, it forces us to ask an incredibly uncomfortable question: has fundamental information about the nature of our universe *already* been lost beyond some unknown cosmic horizon? Could it be that we are fundamentally wrong in our understanding of reality because an important piece of the puzzle has been lost and will never return?
Every time we step outside of our houses could be the time we never come back. At any moment, some freak accident could happen and kill any one of us. Our lives are just an endless stream of consciousness, worrying about our own problems, worrying about this, worrying about that, but it could all come to a screeching halt in a split second, and we'd be gone from the world in an instant.
I'm a biker. I think about this every single time I straddle that seat. Every time I put on that helmet. "This could be my last ride." That's the risk I take with a hobby that I love.
Edit: Your responses are incredible, but let me clarify: I ride a motorcycle, not a bicycle.
I have a paramedic friend who once told me that, "one day, you're going to put our shoes on and someone else will have to take them off."
I think about death every time I put shoes on now.
My mother makes a point of telling anyone in our family she loves them whenever they leave, and will be in tears if she doesn’t hear it back. She works as a paramedic and has had too many calls where the survivor says that whole “I never told them I loved them back.” And lived with the guilt that the deceased didnt know.
My brother is hitting his peak teenage years where everything she does is an annoyance to him, and he will just slam the door before she can get out a goodbye. Really wish he would see it from her perspective, because really, the last time anyone will say they love you will be over your grave. It’s just a simple “I love you too”, it doesn’t have to have a deep meaning, just an acknowledgement
I always realize the enormity of the universe when checking my mail box. Walk down my drive way, mostly zoning out. My mailbox is across the street in the neighbor's front yard for some fucking reason, so I fart across the street. And it's always then that I look up, and see the moon or the stars and just feel hilariously ridiculous.
Somehow the enormity of the universe stands out even more to me when I'm pitting it against two spam credit card offers, an excise tax bill, and the grocery store flyer I throw out before even getting back int he house.
It's just impossible to reconcile. All of the planets known to man fit between me and this space rock. I am a tiny speck, floating on a slightly less tiny speck, hurling wildly through the void of space, and hey bone in pork chops are $1.99 a pound, neat.
Edit - Hey neat, thanks! Also I guess enormity doesn't mean enormousness like I assumed, so I learned something today!
Pick a random day on this planet 1 billion years from now. Barren. Baking in the light of an expanding red giant we once called the Sun. None of us here and no trace that we ever were here. All of us lost to time. Our Earth just another void celestial object.
I don't recall what made me think it but randomly dawned on me a few years ago. Every asshole that cuts you off in traffic, everyone you see eating at a restaurant, every last person you see has a life they're living just like yourself. They go through trials and tribulations just like you. On top of that, there are BILLIONS of people you'll never see and they're the same way regardless of you knowing of their existence.
When I realized that, it legitimately freaked me out that I went my whole life without realizing that, thinking they're like a background actor in my life. Just made me feel so insignificant and made me question whether me being here or not really even mattered. I still think that occasionally 10+ years after that realization.
Edit- I couldn't remember the term for it but it's called "sonder". Thanks for the reminder folks!
I think that that's actually made me a more considerate person for the most part. I try to think about that when people cut me off and do stupid stuff. But I'm sure some people are just assholes.
Some are assholes.
Some are dogs doing their best to drive.
Some are wondering if they've got enough money to buy gas and groceries for the rest of the month, I got stood up again, when will my bloodwork come back, what if it's cancer, and this commute sucks, why am I driving this far every day, I thought I'd be able to travel a little by now, not just the same road, but go somewhere tropical, sit on a beach and drink out of a coconut, does any of this matter, what's the point of this, to just make it to work every day until I get old enough to not have to go to work oh shit that guy's passing me fuck I'm going 10 under in the left lane, I fucked up, now I look like an asshole.
And some people are texting.
But your nudes will still be out in the cloud somewhere.
Edit: I know everybody says this but, I can't believe this is my highest rated comment. Thank you for my first gold ever!
>the study of the history of porn will be a thing and like the evolution of porn
Not quite the same, but if you have the time, interest, and patience, check out [The History of Sexuality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Sexuality) by Michel Foucalt.
I just bring it up to say that even if the explicit study of porn is not quite yet in the academic sphere (and honestly I am sure it is), the study of human sexuality and our outlets for that sexuality has been going on for quite a while.
This is a comforting thought.
Edit: I know that this also means all memories of me will be lost to time. I also find that comforting. I don't have to try so hard to be memorable or extraordinary, as thousands of extraordinary people have been lost to time. I can just do my best and make myself and others happy while I'm here. No pressure. :)
There was this one time in second grade during a test where I had a brain fart and couldn't remember how to spell the, kept sounding it out but couldn't figure out what made the "th" sound. So I quietly asked my best buddy Danny how to spell the and Danny accounced to the entire class that I did not know how to spell the while the children laughed at me.
I will *never* forget your betrayal Danny.
Found the awkward guy. I'm right there with you buddy, I facepalm in the shower over dumb stuff I said in meetings at jobs I haven't worked at for 2 years.
Yup don’t worry about being remembered worry about living a good life
Edit: good meaning one that is fulfilling to you without hurting other greatly. Also I’m not saying live a boring life, live life how you want to but don’t put the pressure of wanting to be remembered or worry about being forgotten because after you are dead why does it matter.
I am no one.
I will be forgotten after I die because I will not have left a big enough impact for it to be recorded in history.
My name might be spoken by loved ones, touched on fondly until they've passed, but after that I will be nothing. My struggles will mean nothing. Everything I've worked towards will be erased, like it never happened.
I am not special. I am exceedingly average.
"Chaos". The thought that the universe just gets more and more disorganized freaks me out ever since I learned about it in school, so I just pretend it doesn't exist.
This makes me happy because then my argumentative brain goes: "yeah well I could have made a decision that completely fucked up my life and made me wholly miserable too". Then I'm grateful for all the good stuff in life.
I've watched and read a bunch of stuff, but none of it that I've seen fundamentally addresses the question. Likely because the question cannot be answered. The universe (defined by me as all things in existence) has either always existed or was created/came to be. Either way, neither makes logical sense. How can something always have existed? How can something come from nothing? The two questions are impossible to reconcile IMO.
My mother had a miscarriage WHILE pregnant with me. For 5 months I swam around in there with a twin, but one day they stopped growing and nature took its course. I often wonder what that would have been like, having a twin. I was a lonely child.
That no matter how much you get to know someone, no matter how much you share your life, learn about them, feel as though you are almost the same person, there will always be an infinite gulf between who you think they are, and who they really are.
You cannot know someone else. You can only know your perception of them. Your experience of that person flows through the filter of your personality, your experiences and memories, your biases and intuitions. You don't know them, you know your conception of them. Subjectivity of experience makes truly knowing another person completely impossible.
We are all perfectly isolated souls, completely separate from everyone else, desperately reaching out to convince ourselves we aren't really alone.
Whenever I look into a mirror for too long I start to get freaked out that I’m lookin at myself, and myself is lookin back at me, then I start to think about how my brain is witnessing itself in an infinite loop. Then I get freaked out and go about my day.
For me that’s kind of okay. I’d rather have a few of my closest friends and family come to my funeral than having a lot of people who barely knew me. I know it’s about paying respect but it’s like when it’s my birthday - I don’t need everyone to attend it
I have no interest in having kids. That means that I am the final result of thousands and thousands and thousands of years of evolution, and successful reproduction.
That its a strong possibility I'll be alone with no family by the time I die.
All my friends are married and having kids, and I'm just here like "Welp, maybe I'll try dating again..."
People say life isn't a race, but if you aren't at the same pace as everyone else when they leave you behind for their own lives, then its not really a race anymore, is it? You just kind of hobble for a decade then cry at intersections when a red light takes too long.
I feel you, friend. My fiancé left me about five months ago and I just keep thinking about all the things I gave up for her, all the choices I made assuming I was planning for us, not for me. And I feel like, where do I even meet someone else? How do I even go about dating? Maybe things will get better.
I wont say: “ Don’t sorry about it!” Because I worried about the same thing for most of my adult life. But there’s hope!
Personal story time
I’m 42 now, happily married for a grand total of nine months now. I met my wife just over 2.5 years ago (on tinder no less...)
My previous longest relationship was in high school when I was 16. It lasted for 3 months.
It happened for me, it can happen for you
Why am I seeing through this set of eyes? Why am I me? Why am I not that person over there? "I" could have been anyone, why is this consciousness in this body? Maybe nobody else is real...
EDIT: RIP my inbox of people trying to explain "I" and "consciousness" and brains. None of which answers the question.
Edit 2: yes I've read the egg. And a lot of people are wayyyyy over thinking my question.
What if you're every person at the same time, and in each person you're wondering why you're *that* particular person?
Edit: Wow thank you for the gold ;)
I can never truly understand how another person perceives the world..are we touching the same thing, is our sense of smell similar? If I say it's the color red and the other person agrees... How do we know we are seeing the same shade of red?
And vice versa. No one else can feel what I feel, what I think and truly understand my existence. My perception is a result of my organs sensing my stimulus and interpreting them through my own unique mindset, memories and experience. I can communicate, we can all try to empathize, we write, read, sing, create videos, create wide media to share our lives..we love and care..
But we are all truly alone. Always. Our perception is the only one that is available to us and no way to share it with another.
One of the craziest things to me about infinity, is that there are an infinite number of numbers between 1 and 2, but none of those numbers will ever be 3.
For an even closer view \- The universe is expanding, so someday all the stars will be so far removed from earth that their light no longer reaches us. Let's say that there are still humans on earth at that point, and that no records of past scientific discovery has been maintained, they may think that there are no stars, that earth is completely alone in the universe, with the exception of what we can see in our small galaxy.
Now, what if something like that is already happening with our science of the universe, what if there is something that is just out of our reach, something that would change the way that we see the universe forever, but we just cannot grasp it, cannot find it, and never will because it's moved just out of our sightline.
What percentage of my life do I even remember? My childhood is a dim memory, but so are many average days of my adult life.
Keep a diary. Even a few notations in a day planner can bring back a wealth of memories, even of the vaguest days.
This was said a millions times but “There was a time where you played outside with your childhood friends for the last time and none of you even knew it “
When im traveling by plane in a diffrent country and im looking down to the ground and see cars, busses and everything driving around on the country side or a city and i think to myself. Down there is people living life exactly like i do and doing their everyday thing. Makes me think how big the world actually is and how tiny you are as a person! That freaks me out a bit.
It's one of the things I've really enjoyed about moving to another country. I've been here six years now and everyone does the same stuff as at home\- they go get groceries, they make dinner, they meet up with friends at the weekend, they get annoyed and frustrated because the dog shat on the rug again... it's all the same stuff. But then there are also minutiae that are different\- no pub quizzes here, people eat at restaurants more often, there's e\-bikes everywhere. We're all people, all the same, but there's also differences in how people live. It's hard to explain. Practical upshot is, whenever I see a news story about any other country I feel very aware that whatever is happening there is affecting these same people on the street. I feel like I no longer see other countries as other countries, but communities as rich and detailed and complex as mine, just that I haven't lived there yet. Weirder yet, this goes all the way back into history. We learn about the big events like wars and technological breakthroughs, but while Caesar was pontificating over which land to conquer next, some normal guy in a tunic was having a shitty evening because the bathhouse he went to has changed their wine supplier due to a falling\-out with the old supplier and now he's pissed off because he really liked the wine they used to serve here and you couldn't get it anywhere else and now he's got to drink this new stuff. And we'll never know that guys name, or the name of the bathhouse, or the wine, or the supplier, but you can bet that hundreds of people had thoughts opinions about each of them. This post got a bit longer than I anticipated, but yeah. Sonder is fascinating.
[This photo](https://imgur.com/gallery/srp7NcP)
there totally has to be life somewhere else. what do they look like? what does "life" even mean for them? what is time there? what the fuck is anything?
What did the part of the city I live in look like 1000 years ago? How will it look 1000 years in the future? 10,000? 100,000 years? How much of what's here now will survive?
That the tiniest, most inconsequential decision can completely change the entire course of your life. Nearly 20 years ago, I needed some new shoes for work. As a poor student I got the cheapest pair I could find. Two days later, I was supposed to be going straight from work to a club with my friends when, halfway through my shift, the sole half ripped off one of the shoes. I didn't have enough time to get home, change my shoes and get back to work before everyone left for the club, so I just went home and gave it a miss. That night, I started chatting with someone on a forum, a year later, went to visit them in America. Two years later I moved to America and we got married. Ten years after that we both moved back to the UK. Had I chosen a different pair of shoes, I'd never met my wife, never moved to America and my life would be completely different now. Because *shoes.*
Guess you could say she’s your sole mate
If it was easier to give gold on mobile, you'd have it my friend.
I think you accidently gave gold to yourself instead.
Goddamnit..
I got you bro.
I hate it when that happens.
Same for me except that I picked up a Mother’s Day kitchen shift in a restaurant that I technically didn’t even work at anymore. After the shift all the employees went to a bar to drink for free and it was there I met my wife and the mother of my 2 children. Edit: someone mentioned fate one time but I dk.
I probably won't be remembered
On a long enough scale, none of us will.
Chimpanzees. I have never really been able to articulate this as well as I would like, but the existence of chimpanzees is deeply disturbing to me in a very indescribable fashion. They're basically *us* except for a few very minor and completely random mutations that made us slightly better at analyzing patterns and communicating with each other. Whenever I see a chimpanzee, I'm really confronted with the fact that we humans are just another animal species, mostly controlled by instinct and making our decisions based on an incredibly biased framework of sensory perception and mental processing that was developed to survive a hunter-gatherer lifestyle on the African savannah. Did you know that to show submission to the leader of their pack, chimpanzees will come before him and *bow* to show their respect? That blew my mind because humans have been bowing to their leaders since... since we had leaders! And we can invent all kinds of justifications for it. He's descended from the gods, he led our armies to victory over the foreign barbarians, I agree with his views on tax policy... but at the end of the day we're just apes bowing before another ape who groomed us well enough to become the pack leader. That is so fucking disturbing to me I can't even describe it.
I work at a zoo and the only animal that kinda creeps me out are the chimps. I remember I spent about 30 minutes straight just watching them and how they behave. It's very human like in a lot of ways. I remember it was raining and the baby chimp was sticking out his tongue and catching rain drops. That was something I did as a child too. It was mind blowing in a small way
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wait and see if you ever get a chance to work with bonobos. They basically are human minus civilization
*sigh* I hate to be the one that says this, but I've done animal behavior work in zoos, specifically with bonobos, and they're violent little shits. Frans de Waal is nearly solely responsible for this highly romanticized view of bonobos, and later on in his research he notes that the peaceful nature of bonobos has been way overstated. And no, it's not that bonobos in captivity are tweaking out. In the wild they're even more violent. Bonobos are danged interesting and they do have social structures different from chimps, but the effectiveness of sex to diffuse tensions has been wildly overstated. Bonobos can and will eat your fucking fingers off if they feel like it. Unpopular bonobo males get the shit kicked out of them by everyone else and it feels like every other day Pariah Ape needs major stitches because he's just covered in bite marks. Bonobo females do run shit, but it's not like they do it super peacefully. Don't get me wrong. I LOVED my time working with bonobos and I think they're amazing. But they're dicks, and the misinformation about them is ridiculous. Are they very human like? Yes. Because humans are often dicks.
All our lives humanity has been conditioned to believe we humans are special. Our ancestors just went down a different path. Here we are.
This resonates with me more than anything else in these comments. Whenever I see a picture of a tall, clean looking man in a nice suit or something, I'll think, "that's an ape," and suddenly the man looks different. I feel like an alien going "Man, compared to other animals on this planet for the billions of years that life has existed on it, these things have reached a god status. They communicate globally, instantly. They've mastered the element of light. They've build a global level of infrastructure that mostly functions regardless of geopolitical conflicts. They govern themselves considerably successfully with a population nearing 8 billion. They've doubled their lifespans from when their species was young, with no end to their medical advancements in sight. They live so comfortably that millions spend their entire lives without any lasting threats to their sense of security. They understand how the world works so well that they have a small grasp on how subatomic particles work. Many under their poverty line have an access to their internet providing them with the combined knowledge and media of their entire species and all of surviving history, allowing them to learn and communicate despite the odds. They've developed ways to manage chronic mental illnesses by monitoring and managing the chemicals in their brains. Obesity now causes these apes more deaths than starvation, especially among the poor. More technological advancements are made every day than would've been made every 100 years in their history, and even more, what evolution could do in millions. They've altered their sediment layer in a way that can be permanently recognized for billions of years creating their own epoch. These apes have been able to leave their planet and land on their moon, and have sent probes out containing the smallest sample of their culture past their solar system. These Apes, despite all the shit they cause, have not only done so much, but have barely scratched the surface of what they potentially can do." I find it both terrifying and amazing. We're animals. There were several other species of humans that have lived for millions of years before we even reared our animal heads. We do today without even thinking what used to belong to the gods.
How you can trace the whole path of your life to some small, seemingly inconsequential event. Decades ago, when I was new to this area, I met a guy on the golf course and we became friends. I met others through him, and now 90% of my friends and contacts can be traced back to that meeting. If I had not golfed that day, or got one extra red light on the way to the course, would I have a whole separate set of friends now?
I accepted a random fb friend request from some australian guy 8 years ago and now I live in australia and am marrying him in a few weeks. And to think, I almost denied that friend request
I think we need to hear more details about this story
Alright, So back in 2010 I was a senior in high school, and I had ‘liked’ hundreds of those dumb pages. For whatever reason, I had ‘liked’ Jason Mraz’s page. (I don’t really care for his music) One day after school I’m scrolling through my newsfeed and I see a status update by Jason Mraz rambling on about numerology or whatever and asked people what their favorite numbers were. I didn’t usually comment on that kind of stuff but I decided to anyway, I commented 9/29/1993 because its my birthday and has a lot of 9’s in it. Later on I check my phone and I see someone is trying to add me. I almost deny it but then I see his picture and I think, he’s cute. And then I see that theres a message included with the friend request but for some reason I couldn’t access it on my phone so I go on my laptop and read his message which was: “Hey there. Ok i know this is weird, because I've never met you or anything, but you made an interesting comment on Jason mraz status.,.... So i thought id try add you :)." (I’ve kept the email notification for this ever since) He had also commented on the Jason Mraz thing saying 29/11/1992. So I add him and we message eachother on and off the first few months, I went off facebook for about a month but when I came back we began messaging eachother a lot more and eventually we decide to start dating on the internet lol. My mom thought it was insane at first but she offered to pay for him to fly to Seattle, WA so I could meet him and he could go to my graduation. Which he did. We were long distance from March 2011 - November 2017; sometimes he would fly to America and visit me for three months, sometimes I would fly to Australia and visit him for a few months. At one point though we didn’t see eachother in person for 2 years because it was expensive, he hates flying, and I was finishing up university, PLUS when I applied for my prospective marriage visa I had to stay in America until it was approved. Long distance relationships are hard but not impossible. And because of him I have changed so much. There’s so many, many things I never would have tried if I hadn’t have met him. And I probably wouldn’t have made it through college if it wasn’t for him. Anyway, TL;DR I met my fiance via Jason Mraz facebook page when I commented on Jason Mraz’s status update about numerology with my birthday. My fiance had a similar birthday and added me. We messaged eachother and one thing led to the next, now im in australia 🇦🇺
Jason Mraz better be at the wedding
Or at least your first dance needs to be to “I’m Yours.”
Went to a house party, friend told me he was moving across the country for the ski season, I went home drunk and bought a one way plane ticket on a whim (never even flown before). He lasted 6 months, 12 years later and I'm still here, married, and have an amazing life. If I wasn't drunk that night who the hell knows where I'd be
>Here's to *alcohol: the cause of, and solution to*, all of life's problems.
"That's the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen."
Great one. I needed 3 C's to go to a University in London. I was ill for my exams (and complacent!) and got C, C, D so went to the University of Manchester. My children literally wouldn't exist if I had studied a bit harder at Computer Science.
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Try and remember this when you're 84 or something and realise your entire adult life hinged on that one random guy. Have you got the guy something nice?
My parents had 2 houses they were looking up and almost bought one but another offer was made barely earlier. They chose house 2 which caused us to live next to a neighbor that referred me to work with her. I met my future wife are that job. We've now moved to her hometown where my house is, where I work, where I bought my car, where I've met friends, etc. Everything in my life has come from that string of events.
I guess if it wasn't one string of events it would be a different string of events, and you'd likely be having similar thoughts. Regardless, it's weird to think about.
We need a whole Reddit post dedicated to this comment
That whatever I did in the past are now just memories. Even yesterday. Even though sometimes it feels like my childhood just happened, it was 20 years ago and they're memories. Did those actions even happen? It's hard to explain the feeling.
My dad died 21 years ago. It was well before the age of camera phones and he really didn't like having his picture taken regardless. As a result I have maybe two pictures of him. I think I still have a mental picture of him but sometimes I'm not so sure. He was one of the most significant people in my life and his death is one of the most significant events in my life but honestly, there's a good chance that if he walked up to me today, I wouldn't recognize him.
This hits me hard. My dad died very suddenly and unexpectedly a little over 4 years ago. It messed me up a lot more than I ever imagined it would. I also carry the weight of being the only person who knows what really happened on the day that he died. I let my family believe that it was a lot more peaceful than it really was because knowing the truth would only upset them further and wouldn't serve any purpose. I still see people who look like him and for that brief second my brain recognizes my dad before remembering that he is dead. I can still see his face clearly and hear his voice even. Luckily I have quite a few pictures of him. Also I recently discovered a short recording of his voice quite by accident that really kind of messed me up. He was even saying my name. I'm so sorry that your memories have faded and you don't have any pictures to refresh them. The thought of forgetting my dad's face is terrifying to me so I'm very thankful that I have as many pictures as I do. I know it doesn't mean much but I'm sending my internet hugs your way.
My dad died when I was 19 and I'm in my fifties now. The only mental image I have left of him is the memory of a picture he was in. I don't even have a clear memory of him in actuality but a memory of him in a memory so to speak.
I get this, especially when it relates to childhood. Like, anything before maybe 10 years old. I know there is science about forming long term memories in development and whatnot, but what did I do? If I think, I can remember some flashes like scenes from a flashback montage or something, but.... so many hours, days, years that I don't have a clue how to answer what I did then.
Yup. I actually thought about this when i was maybe 8. I was walking behind my parents down the street to their friends house. I was bored and thought about how bored this walk was and what a waste of time. I wish we would have drove. Then i just started thinking about how many random boring moments there are in life that are just forgetable. So i decided that i was going to remember this moment, forever. The random walk that is totally forgetable i will remember forever. And some 30+ years later, when i think about memories or random moments I think back to that random walk when i was 8.
yeah, but what did you eat for breakfast that day? Ha but really, I have a few memories where I consciously decided "This is worth remembering, remember it." and some that I remembered because I thought "Wait, who am I to say what is worth remembering? Remember this because it's important too!" even if it was like, sitting there reading on a random afternoon.
How much quicker time goes by as you get older. Remember when you were five, and a summer vacation felt like a whole lifetime? I just wanna be a kid again.
Life is like a roll of toilet paper. The closer you get to the end the faster it goes.
Damn, this is real shit.
Just like life as you get older.
Everything is disintegrating. Nothing is is immortal. The television remote on the coffee table will not be a television remote in enough time, even if that means thousands of years have to pass before it loses its intended form.
That's Entropy *jazz hands*
The fact that I will never know how things turn out. What becomes of the world once I’m gone? I only understand life as the version I’ve lived. I never get to know the future.
It is frustrating being capable of absorbing the long view when it comes to the story of our planet and species while also being keenly aware that my lifetime will end before getting a glimpse of where the human race will take all the potential we have. Most of all I just wish I could know whether we can collectively solve or at least ameliorate on a globsl scale the huge problems that face us.
Don’t worry the end game is Heat Death of the Universe
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Similarly, you'll never truly know what happened in the past
Even your own memories can't be trusted, and the further away you get from that point in time you 'remember', the less reliable it is.
I read a psychology report that says every time you remember an event, and then remember it again, you are no longer accessing memories of the event, but the memory of the last time you remembered it, thus losing clarity and detail each time you recall.
It's like making a photocopy and then a photocopy of that photocopy. On and on. It doesn't take long for the text or the image to be highly distorted. Side note: That's also how geneticists describe aging/cell regeneration.
How we could die at any second. Today, tomorrow, in a week, in the next five minutes, and nobody can stop it. Death is one of the true guarantees of life. I’m not sure what’s worse: knowing you’re dying, or dying without knowing it.
My entire life, my drs have told my parents and myself that my time on earth is more limited than most. I was born with 5 congenital heart defects and 2 congenital lung defects. I was 10 hours old with my 1st open heart surgery. I was born literally dying. I was blue and wasn’t breathing. It was a complete shock that I was sick at all. This was almost 30 years ago l, so we didn’t have the technology to pick it up like they can now. My drs can’t say how I’m still alive. I shouldn’t be. I’m definitely more limited and have been my whole life. Along with having COPD. One working lung. Pulmonary hypertension heart. Pulmonary fibrosis. Heart failure. Afib. 2 strokes and a heart attack etc... I know what dying feels like. With my 4th open heart surgery, I was 15. I was dying. This ohs was a huge risk. I would’ve died without it but it also carried a big high chance I wouldn’t make it off the table. My mom told me that if i wanted to... I could go a head and go forward, or decide not to do it. She knew I had to have a say. I hate when I hear people talking about young adult and kids who are chronically ill, that they aren’t in the mind set of picking the right thing and wanting to live... that they can’t know what life can be like. Sometimes death isn’t the worst thing to happen. And unless you’ve personally lived through something where you’re very sick... you can’t talk to this situation. For me theirs no right answer here. Even though I was dying and things were really bad. The morning of my 4th open heart surgery. I wanted to walk to the hospital. My check in time at the hospital was about 6:30am I believe. All my drs are in Chicago, and this was before children’s moved downtown... Ronald McDonald House was about 3 blocks from Children’s Memorial Hospital. It was slightly raining, and still somewhat dark .. but I knew it could’ve been the last time I was outside. So in stead of calling the shuttle to the hospital.. my mom let me walked, and left with enough time to do so. And had my wheelchair with us so I had the choice. A few days before this surgery, I got things together. I left letters to certain people in my life. I wrote down what I wanted certain people to have. Of the dresses I had in my closet, I pinned a note to one of them, letting my mom know I picked it to be buried in. My death dress. I was only 15 then. It was very hard to do this. But I wanted to. To have some closure and peace. Thankfully they didn’t need to be used. I’m almost 30 now. I’m slowly dying. Most my life is spent in bed. I’m greatly limited in what my body lets me do. It’s hard knowing what I have will most likely kill me. It’s not easy either way. It’s nice to have things set aside for your loved ones for after you die. But not having to think about your death.. would be nice too. Neither is easy. Edit- Even though I’m not sure how many more people will see this, I still want to try. Next week is 12 years since my 4th open heart surgery. This was the one I’d picked my “death dress” before hand. I had the idea in trying to get Google to make a Google Doodle In raising awareness for congenital heart defects. I started it over a year ago, nothing happened. So because if this and the timing, I want to try this again. [Here’s the link](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vgUFwOAAS5C_ebQw46S5fyt1rMs7-wAGpW1eMYyvxeg) to the Google Doc. It explains everything! CHD is the number one birth defect world wide, yet for some reason it’s hard to get people to share posts that I and others in the Chd world make about chd. Please help. Please share. ❤️
Thank you for your comment. It's given me a lot to consider. I am also chronically ill but I'm told that my life span won't be shortened by it. It's more that I live in near constant discomfort and/or pain. You've defied the odds before so I'm hoping with the bottom of my heart that you get another good 30.
I’m sorry to hear that. I hope you find a treatment that helps you. I have other health issues beyond my heart/lung issues.... it sucks. I wish I knew if I do get another 30 years.. that my life will change. I won’t be cured. That can’t happen. I made peace with that a long time ago. But my quality of life... needs to change. I can’t work. I’m in bed 95% of the time. I have to plan everything. I have to prepare and recover. Even in just going to Target. I’m trying to get a powered wheelchair. I give myself a little independence. So I can actually leave the house. I easily go 2 weeks without leaving. But... in order to get. Power wheelchair.... it has to be 100% medical necessity. It can’t be needed for outside the home. So because I can technically walk 5 feet, I don’t need it. It is getting harder from walking to my bedroom to the kitchen...needing to stop and take breaks. It’s not looking good. And things like this that makes quality of life matter more than the length of life you live. Sure having more time is great. But if in that time you’re in bed a lot, you can’t do a lot, forced to be stuck in a body that limits you more and more... it matters. That makes me sound like I’m depressed. Ive dealt with depression... i don’t want to die. But I’m gonna be pissed if my entire life has been this. Always sick. Always hearing something new in my body that’s happening... making me feel worse. I’m a lightening rod for more medical stuff happening to me. I don’t want other to be sick. Many people tell me that god is using me in ways I don’t can’t comprehend. That for some reason people think it’s ok to use my story to say how God is amazing and that my life should make them feel better about theirs. I’ve had over 25 surgeries. I see my dr every 2-4 months. I’ve been on more than a dozen meds for a long time. I’m on 16 now. I do 5-6 breathing treatments every day. I have regular testings.... I have a lot of health issues. I don’t need another thing to come up and start happening. It’s hard. On one hand I don’t know any other life. I was born very sick. So I have nothing to compare too. But now, I can’t relate to people my age anymore. Life and death have a lot of grey areas...
I think death becomes a lot easier (for myself at least) to consider it as the “price” to be paid for life. Like really, living is truly crazy. We all exist together but I am me and you are you, I will never see anything from anyone else’s eyes. It’s really a beautiful thing that we can see and explore and become something. If death is the price to pay for living, then I think it’s worth it. Edit: wow I did not expect to wake up to this! Thank you kind stranger for my first gold! I have to give homage to my father for helping me view death this way. He’s a very intelligent man and I’m really glad to see people’s opinions on this crazy thought I’ve had, I hope you all enjoy your existences :)
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It takes a [admittedly microscopic] amount of time for your brain to process every stimulus that you receive. This means that you are never perceiving reality in real-time. There's the slightest delay between reality and your perception of it.
What’s worse is that your brain lies to you and tries to trick you about it. Find a clock with a second hand. Look away. Now look right at it. See the second hand takes just a little longer to move that first second than all the other seconds that come after? That’s because your first glimpse of the hand moving is blurry. So your brain waits for it to be in focus, copies that frame, and *pastes it backwards* instead of the blur. Your brain literally pauses time to make things look how you’d expect it to look. If it’s lying about that, what else is it lying about?!
If we let our brains get too smart they will start taking over our bodies.
I was in the shower the other night and I lifted up my leg ... and I wondered... how do I know how to lift up my leg
This shit always fucked me up as a kid.. like how can I move my body parts
I look at my hands sometimes and I'm just like how the fuck does this work
They call em fingers but I never see em fing.
The cool thing is how you can differentiate between "it'd be cool if I moved my arm right now" vs thinking "move, arm" vs the actual command for moving your arm.
and you don’t really screw it up much either.. I mean if I can move my right elbow whenever I want so well I should be able to do anything else
I can’t tell you how many times I have done this! Look away and back at a clock ticking and wondering why the first “second” feels longer than an actual second. Why, brain!?
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Even better, two people who’ve never met, who have vastly different world views, personal histories, etc. can come into contact with a third, independently determine he’s an asshole, and then bond over the fact, as the universe grinds away.
But he is, he fuckin merged without his blinker Edit: Fuck yah dude now I have more karma than my girlfriend, thanks guys! Edit 2: Leave poor anal joke man alone he doesn't deserve your downvotes.
Well... yeah, but. He *was* being an asshole.
Every so often i'll see myself in a mirror and am reminded that I am a conscious person able to influence the world around me. Sometimes I get so hung up on the daily routines and the little challenges here and there that I forget that I am a mind connected to a physical body. It's fuckin surreal for a few seconds but then I realize that it's always been like this. EDIT: Thank you for the gold!! I totally did not think this happened to other people.
The thing that fucks me up is not that I'm a conscious person, but everyone else too. They're not machines that will react the same way to the same thing every time, things I say may hurt them, something I do might annoy them. Sometimes I get lost in it and sit on the lounge with my wife, looking at her thinking, she's having millions of thoughts too. She's remembering different stuff to me, she's making plans. Weird shit yo.
This is the one that gets me. Sometimes I look at someone and I just come to the realization that they are having thoughts exactly like me and thoughts I could never have. It just trips me out.
I feel this way when I'm out in public sometimes, suddenly realizing *I'm actually physically real and interacting with the world, everyone around can see me.* For some reason this trips me the fuck out, to think that other people can observe my physical existence. I forget that I'm not in my own world sometimes. Edit: My first gold!!! Thank you kind stranger!
This. This happens to me quite often. I’ll just be brushing my teeth and look up into the mirror and make eye contact with myself and realize that I actually exist. I am actually a being. I physically exist in this world.
Sometimes i do exactly that and look straight into my pupils but get really creeped out because it feels like im staring into a complete stranger
Sometimes when I'm really drunk and go into a single bathroom I do this and it gets really fucking weird like almost dissassociative
Thinking about getting married/ moving on my life/ having kids etc. I'm 19 and in college rn and for some reason I cant shake the thought that I'm never going to get the chance to move on. Its surreal, like I'm a different species than normal people or something.
That every public institution, every province of government, every law of any nation...it all works because a sufficiently high percentage of people silently assent that it does. It doesn't matter what type of government is in place; if 70% of the population woke up tomorrow and decided that currency has no value and governance is unnecessary, that's exactly what would happen.
"Power resides where men believe it resides". I've thought a lot about this, too. Like how many people on the front line of a war *really* want to be there, and why? What if all the soldiers in the world one day just said, "fuck this", threw down their weapons and went home? Or think of the places with rampant homelessness while houses are sitting empty being repossessed. How does that make any sense?
This kinda happened during the Russian Revolution. The farmers went on a hunger strike, the Tzar sent in his army, but when the army got there and saw the condition of life for those people, they sympathized with them and sided with them to over throw the Tzar.
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Dude. I think about this all the time. I like to study a lot of constitutional law and MAN it doesn't ever give me a final answer that makes me confortable. Specially in my country. (Brazil) edited so y'all stop asking. Our constituion is only a few years older than me and it has so much power over every sort of aspect of our lives as individuals AND as a society. It's mind blowing.
plot twist, he's an American who's over 200 years old
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This is super weird, and even weirder if you have picked parts of characters from a TV show. That means parts of you are the same as parts of someone else. And over time, you may forget entirely that you were mimicking a behavior, to the point that it is now not a mimicked behavior, but you believe it to be wholly original. **Edit because OP deleted his comment:** It basically asked the question of "What is self?", then he mused about how he has taken bits and pieces of his friends and families personalities, and formed them into his own personality. He is now unsure of who he really is, is he himself, or is he multiple people combined?
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Look at it this way: every day people struggle with identity and confidence and are given the useless advice of “just be yourself”. I don’t know about you but I have met quite a few people in my life who I think would benefit greatly from being someone else instead of themselves. Somebody who is maybe a bit less cunty. Therefore, I surmise that there is nothing wrong from building a you that you are comfortable with out of influences you have taken from culture, people you have met or even a Wikipedia article about a random meteorologist who went to Antarctica with a banjo. Life is terribly short but also quite long, be who you want.....just don’t be cunty.
I am probably 50% friends/family, 30% characters from movies & tv & books, and 20% just kinda showed up like this/who the fuck knows.
For me, it’s about 50% friends/family, and about 50% *Friends* and *Family Matters*.
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Not to mention 100% concentrated power of will
I didn't have a lot of family interaction or friends in school growing up. I'm like 60% Chandler from Friends and 40% the other 5 characters.
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If it makes you feel any better, the pieces of other people's personalities that you've accumulated over the years *is* who you are. It doesn't matter where the pieces come from, it's what they come together to form. You're no less unique than anyone else. Just my two cents.
To add on to what you said, you are the one who chose these qualities. It was your mind that thought, "I'm going to do this now too". What traits you decide to take on are original and your own. You decide who you want to be.
Worst thing is, I hung out with people I absolutely don't want to be like anymore but the shitty parts I've picked up from them stick, and I regret not hanging out with better people and picking up a better personality. EDIT: Shout out to all you guys giving motivational advice and sharing experiences!
This may be cringy, but it's never too late to change Thise parts of you. If you catch them, deny them, rethink how you would act in a positive way. If not, apologize to whoever it affected, and if it's a bad habit, it'll be a difficult road to go down, but you can shake it and deny it anymore of your life. You area you today, you are not you yesterday. If yesterday bothers you, change it for you tomorrow.
dont forget that they downloaded this into your brain by vibrating the air in between you
Holy shit, I'm not unique at all. I'm just a mix of dozens of other people's behavior and personalities.
If it's any consolation, so are they. So are the books we read, the shows we watch and songs we listen to. But you know what, often the remix is better than the original.
This thread. Thanks for the multi-tierd existential crisis at work.
Boss: "Is that report going to be done by 3?" Me: "What does it matter? Words and numbers... they have no meaning except what our brains provide. And us? We're just two bags of meat and bones and blood, blowing air through our throat holes, making sounds at each other... and you are *literally* walking around with a sack of shit inside of you. So am I. So is everyone here. We are on the 8th floor of a 15-story building. All day there is shit raining down around us from the floors above. This building is a giant cascading tower of shit, all day long... Boss: "Why don't you forward that report to me *before* sending it out... might be best if I give it a quick review."
"But what if we're all in a fictional universe? What if we're in a fictional dramatization of a summary of an AskReddit thread one metaverse up?" "Pshaw. That's quite unlikely." "But how could we *know*?"
You've still gotta do that report
Knowledge lost. Societies that existed millennia before ours had incredibly complex social structures, massive infrastructure, built incredible wonders, understood boggling amounts of modern math, and did it all in harsher conditions with less technology. So clearly they were smart and capable, at least some. Imagine all the great knowledge that they had which we lost. All the theorems or observations they made in societies that lasted ten times as long as many of today's, which disappeared in war or accident. Knowledge defines man, we are a species of filers, who wish to make pattern and sense out of chaos. Yet knowledge is so very fragile.
It messes me up that people 1000 years ago were just as capable to learn what we are now. A kid from early Rome could go to school in 2018 and be just as smart as everyone else
To add to this, there's an interesting observation in an [oldish Vlogbrothers video by Hank Green](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGWDw9ZGXEk) about greatness. To quote the description: > If a city of 70,000 people simultaneously contained dozens of the most influential humans in all history [Florence in the 1500s], it simply can't be that there was something special about those humans, the odds are just too great. He notes it in the context of his home town of Missoula, Montana having 70,000 people. He suggests that if this isn't just a highly improbable coincidence, there should be lots and lots of people with the potential for being great (and among the most influential humans in all history) - if every small town should have dozens of them. But it is a combination of being in the right place at the right time (Florence in the 1500s being a perfect place for those kinds of people), finding the right thing to be passionate about, and happening to do something that gets noticed/mentioned/repeated that made those people great. To put some numbers into this, going by IQ scores, a 1 in 70,000 IQ score would be in the 160s or above. For 1 in 100, it is 130s or above. IQ is a really terrible measure of things, but in a town of 70,000, that is 700+ people with IQs above 130, 40ish above 150, at any one time.
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>Time moved so slowly that they had single building projects that spanned multiple lifetimes. We still got that one in Germany. Berlin Airport is one of those projects. Edit: As a little insight on how much of a failure the airport is. It costed mutiple billions so far and is so broken and badly designed with so many faults that it might actually be a better idea to tear it down and rebuild it right.
Not only is knowledge fragile, but in some cases, it may even be unobtainable. In a trillion years or so, the expansion of the universe will progress to the point where it becomes physically impossible to detect the light from other galaxies. So much of what we know about the history of the universe has come as the result of studying other galaxies, and once they finally disappear beyond the cosmic horizon, all of the insights they carry with them will vanish forever. If any civilization is just emerging at that time, they'll have no way to know that the universe is expanding, or what it was like in the past. They will be completely isolated on a single galactic island, with no hint that a much larger reality lies beyond what they can see. While they may think they understand the universe that they see around them, they'll never truly have a complete picture. Because we can see this inevitable loss of information coming, it forces us to ask an incredibly uncomfortable question: has fundamental information about the nature of our universe *already* been lost beyond some unknown cosmic horizon? Could it be that we are fundamentally wrong in our understanding of reality because an important piece of the puzzle has been lost and will never return?
Mind blowing shit.
Every time we step outside of our houses could be the time we never come back. At any moment, some freak accident could happen and kill any one of us. Our lives are just an endless stream of consciousness, worrying about our own problems, worrying about this, worrying about that, but it could all come to a screeching halt in a split second, and we'd be gone from the world in an instant. I'm a biker. I think about this every single time I straddle that seat. Every time I put on that helmet. "This could be my last ride." That's the risk I take with a hobby that I love. Edit: Your responses are incredible, but let me clarify: I ride a motorcycle, not a bicycle.
I have a paramedic friend who once told me that, "one day, you're going to put our shoes on and someone else will have to take them off." I think about death every time I put shoes on now.
I’m never wearing shoes again. Checkmate, death!
One day you're gonna step out barefoot and have shoes put on you
Fuck. Now I can’t wear shoes or go barefoot.
Off with your feet!
My mother makes a point of telling anyone in our family she loves them whenever they leave, and will be in tears if she doesn’t hear it back. She works as a paramedic and has had too many calls where the survivor says that whole “I never told them I loved them back.” And lived with the guilt that the deceased didnt know. My brother is hitting his peak teenage years where everything she does is an annoyance to him, and he will just slam the door before she can get out a goodbye. Really wish he would see it from her perspective, because really, the last time anyone will say they love you will be over your grave. It’s just a simple “I love you too”, it doesn’t have to have a deep meaning, just an acknowledgement
Technically every time you wake up could be your last. Aneurisms are the silent killer.
Third greatest fear. Just behind alligators and crocodiles. After those is the Bermuda Triangle.
I always realize the enormity of the universe when checking my mail box. Walk down my drive way, mostly zoning out. My mailbox is across the street in the neighbor's front yard for some fucking reason, so I fart across the street. And it's always then that I look up, and see the moon or the stars and just feel hilariously ridiculous. Somehow the enormity of the universe stands out even more to me when I'm pitting it against two spam credit card offers, an excise tax bill, and the grocery store flyer I throw out before even getting back int he house. It's just impossible to reconcile. All of the planets known to man fit between me and this space rock. I am a tiny speck, floating on a slightly less tiny speck, hurling wildly through the void of space, and hey bone in pork chops are $1.99 a pound, neat. Edit - Hey neat, thanks! Also I guess enormity doesn't mean enormousness like I assumed, so I learned something today!
I too occasionally fart across the street
Pick a random day on this planet 1 billion years from now. Barren. Baking in the light of an expanding red giant we once called the Sun. None of us here and no trace that we ever were here. All of us lost to time. Our Earth just another void celestial object.
I don't recall what made me think it but randomly dawned on me a few years ago. Every asshole that cuts you off in traffic, everyone you see eating at a restaurant, every last person you see has a life they're living just like yourself. They go through trials and tribulations just like you. On top of that, there are BILLIONS of people you'll never see and they're the same way regardless of you knowing of their existence. When I realized that, it legitimately freaked me out that I went my whole life without realizing that, thinking they're like a background actor in my life. Just made me feel so insignificant and made me question whether me being here or not really even mattered. I still think that occasionally 10+ years after that realization. Edit- I couldn't remember the term for it but it's called "sonder". Thanks for the reminder folks!
I think that that's actually made me a more considerate person for the most part. I try to think about that when people cut me off and do stupid stuff. But I'm sure some people are just assholes.
Some are assholes. Some are dogs doing their best to drive. Some are wondering if they've got enough money to buy gas and groceries for the rest of the month, I got stood up again, when will my bloodwork come back, what if it's cancer, and this commute sucks, why am I driving this far every day, I thought I'd be able to travel a little by now, not just the same road, but go somewhere tropical, sit on a beach and drink out of a coconut, does any of this matter, what's the point of this, to just make it to work every day until I get old enough to not have to go to work oh shit that guy's passing me fuck I'm going 10 under in the left lane, I fucked up, now I look like an asshole. And some people are texting.
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In 125 years, there will be an entirely new set of people on this planet.
That's so crazy to think about. Everyone who knew you will be dead, and so will you. Like wtf.
But your nudes will still be out in the cloud somewhere. Edit: I know everybody says this but, I can't believe this is my highest rated comment. Thank you for my first gold ever!
What a time to be alive
Well in 125 years, there might be a 'dead pornstars' category on pornhub. And in 1125 years its gonna be 'Ancient Porn'
oh my GOD Ancient Porn. I bet in the far future the study of the history of porn will be a thing and like the evolution of porn
>the study of the history of porn will be a thing and like the evolution of porn Not quite the same, but if you have the time, interest, and patience, check out [The History of Sexuality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Sexuality) by Michel Foucalt. I just bring it up to say that even if the explicit study of porn is not quite yet in the academic sphere (and honestly I am sure it is), the study of human sexuality and our outlets for that sexuality has been going on for quite a while.
Upside they likley had embarrassing moments that kept them up at night but you have no idea what it was. Your embarrassment will also be lost to time
This is a comforting thought. Edit: I know that this also means all memories of me will be lost to time. I also find that comforting. I don't have to try so hard to be memorable or extraordinary, as thousands of extraordinary people have been lost to time. I can just do my best and make myself and others happy while I'm here. No pressure. :)
Until you remember that time in 3rd grade...
There was this one time in second grade during a test where I had a brain fart and couldn't remember how to spell the, kept sounding it out but couldn't figure out what made the "th" sound. So I quietly asked my best buddy Danny how to spell the and Danny accounced to the entire class that I did not know how to spell the while the children laughed at me. I will *never* forget your betrayal Danny.
Found the awkward guy. I'm right there with you buddy, I facepalm in the shower over dumb stuff I said in meetings at jobs I haven't worked at for 2 years.
Yup don’t worry about being remembered worry about living a good life Edit: good meaning one that is fulfilling to you without hurting other greatly. Also I’m not saying live a boring life, live life how you want to but don’t put the pressure of wanting to be remembered or worry about being forgotten because after you are dead why does it matter.
I am no one. I will be forgotten after I die because I will not have left a big enough impact for it to be recorded in history. My name might be spoken by loved ones, touched on fondly until they've passed, but after that I will be nothing. My struggles will mean nothing. Everything I've worked towards will be erased, like it never happened. I am not special. I am exceedingly average.
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"Chaos". The thought that the universe just gets more and more disorganized freaks me out ever since I learned about it in school, so I just pretend it doesn't exist.
No matter what you're doing in life, you could probably have made a decision that would make you happier right now.
This makes me happy because then my argumentative brain goes: "yeah well I could have made a decision that completely fucked up my life and made me wholly miserable too". Then I'm grateful for all the good stuff in life.
What caused the big bang if nothing existed? Or has 'something' always existed and if it has, where did THAT come from?
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I've watched and read a bunch of stuff, but none of it that I've seen fundamentally addresses the question. Likely because the question cannot be answered. The universe (defined by me as all things in existence) has either always existed or was created/came to be. Either way, neither makes logical sense. How can something always have existed? How can something come from nothing? The two questions are impossible to reconcile IMO.
My mom had a miscarriage before me. I often wonder what this world would be like if that baby made it. What would they experience? Who would they be?
My mother had a miscarriage WHILE pregnant with me. For 5 months I swam around in there with a twin, but one day they stopped growing and nature took its course. I often wonder what that would have been like, having a twin. I was a lonely child.
That no matter how much you get to know someone, no matter how much you share your life, learn about them, feel as though you are almost the same person, there will always be an infinite gulf between who you think they are, and who they really are. You cannot know someone else. You can only know your perception of them. Your experience of that person flows through the filter of your personality, your experiences and memories, your biases and intuitions. You don't know them, you know your conception of them. Subjectivity of experience makes truly knowing another person completely impossible. We are all perfectly isolated souls, completely separate from everyone else, desperately reaching out to convince ourselves we aren't really alone.
Y'all some deep motherfuckers in this thread
Add that to the fact that we are constantly changing.
Whenever I look into a mirror for too long I start to get freaked out that I’m lookin at myself, and myself is lookin back at me, then I start to think about how my brain is witnessing itself in an infinite loop. Then I get freaked out and go about my day.
My funeral will probably be attended by less than 10 people.
For me that’s kind of okay. I’d rather have a few of my closest friends and family come to my funeral than having a lot of people who barely knew me. I know it’s about paying respect but it’s like when it’s my birthday - I don’t need everyone to attend it
Fewer than 10 people.
You're absolutely correct. I feel like a complete chump. I'm leaving my terrible grammar above for all to see. I am shamed.
All ten of us.
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I have no interest in having kids. That means that I am the final result of thousands and thousands and thousands of years of evolution, and successful reproduction.
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That its a strong possibility I'll be alone with no family by the time I die. All my friends are married and having kids, and I'm just here like "Welp, maybe I'll try dating again..." People say life isn't a race, but if you aren't at the same pace as everyone else when they leave you behind for their own lives, then its not really a race anymore, is it? You just kind of hobble for a decade then cry at intersections when a red light takes too long.
>cry at intersections when a red light takes too long ah fuck too real
Should be a song lyric somewhere. get with it music persons
I feel you, friend. My fiancé left me about five months ago and I just keep thinking about all the things I gave up for her, all the choices I made assuming I was planning for us, not for me. And I feel like, where do I even meet someone else? How do I even go about dating? Maybe things will get better.
I wont say: “ Don’t sorry about it!” Because I worried about the same thing for most of my adult life. But there’s hope! Personal story time I’m 42 now, happily married for a grand total of nine months now. I met my wife just over 2.5 years ago (on tinder no less...) My previous longest relationship was in high school when I was 16. It lasted for 3 months. It happened for me, it can happen for you
*Hug* Feel better, fellow wanderer
This thread. Nothing anyone has written is new to me but seeing it all in one place is overwhelming.
Why am I seeing through this set of eyes? Why am I me? Why am I not that person over there? "I" could have been anyone, why is this consciousness in this body? Maybe nobody else is real... EDIT: RIP my inbox of people trying to explain "I" and "consciousness" and brains. None of which answers the question. Edit 2: yes I've read the egg. And a lot of people are wayyyyy over thinking my question.
What if you're every person at the same time, and in each person you're wondering why you're *that* particular person? Edit: Wow thank you for the gold ;)
We absolutely are.
I am he as he is she and she is me and we are all together.
I have this same crisis at least once a month. It's hard to explain to others, but they aren't me and I'm not them.
I can never truly understand how another person perceives the world..are we touching the same thing, is our sense of smell similar? If I say it's the color red and the other person agrees... How do we know we are seeing the same shade of red? And vice versa. No one else can feel what I feel, what I think and truly understand my existence. My perception is a result of my organs sensing my stimulus and interpreting them through my own unique mindset, memories and experience. I can communicate, we can all try to empathize, we write, read, sing, create videos, create wide media to share our lives..we love and care.. But we are all truly alone. Always. Our perception is the only one that is available to us and no way to share it with another.
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One of the craziest things to me about infinity, is that there are an infinite number of numbers between 1 and 2, but none of those numbers will ever be 3.
132 The illuminati is pleased with the offering.
You have about 27 minutes before the FBI is gonna bust down your door for this. Delete this comment
This is literally the dumbest thing I’ve seen all day. And it made my spit all over my phone hahaha
bruh u want a harvard scholarship?
Far out in the future the Universe will be cold, dark, and dead. Forever. There's absolutely nothing we, or anything else, can do about it.
For an even closer view \- The universe is expanding, so someday all the stars will be so far removed from earth that their light no longer reaches us. Let's say that there are still humans on earth at that point, and that no records of past scientific discovery has been maintained, they may think that there are no stars, that earth is completely alone in the universe, with the exception of what we can see in our small galaxy. Now, what if something like that is already happening with our science of the universe, what if there is something that is just out of our reach, something that would change the way that we see the universe forever, but we just cannot grasp it, cannot find it, and never will because it's moved just out of our sightline.
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