Existentialism and war.

The two elements of this title are only sort-of related. Don't read too much into it.

Okay, so the ideas of death and dying have been on my mind so much recently. It's a kind of thinking where you get a little nauseated when you ponder things, but I think I have come to the crux of the issue, and here it is:

Eventually, the entire universe will cease to be, and I will have no idea anything happened. The entirety of the many billions and billions of years that will pass will, to me, seem to go in a fraction of a second because I won't be aware. In fact, I won't even know the difference between the universe existing and it ceasing to exist. The transition will be lost on me.

That is a big thought. However, when I stop and consider it, I don't really want to know. I don't want to be around to witness the end of everything. It's like a morbid curiosity. I want to know but if I ever knew I would want to not know. So I think it's for the best that I won't know. Even though it makes me a little sad, I think the knowledge and the weight that would accompany it would make me even sadder. Billions of years elapsed before I was born and that didn't seem to take any time at all, and I don't regret not seeing how it all started, so I guess it's not a big deal that I won't see how it ends.

Don't get me wrong, though. The finality of death is still depressing to me and it does make it hard for me to fall asleep sometimes. If you know me personally, then you know that's pretty big, because I can usually fall asleep in eight seconds. I have lost, as near as I care to figure, 19.5 hours of sleep since last Sunday over this. That is time just lying in bed, thinking about all the time that I won't be able to think.

That's another regret. Losing my ability to think and reason. As a person who loves those two things as much as I do, the thought is heart-wrenching that I will lose both and all my accumulated knowledge.

Anyway, that is all besides the point. I am going to die and I have got to get over it and I won't see how it ends and I have got to get over THAT, too. I guess I'll just try to avoid thinking about it. What will happen will happen, and it will happen that I will cease to happen. Ho hum and that's the end of it. If we all only get one lifetime, I have just got to make sure that I make the most of mine, and sitting around thinking about not having time (since it's a construct that the dead can't appreciate or even notice) is certainly not a good time.

It's late, so forgive my affected speech.

About war, though. War is a way for people to get ahead by killing other people, and I hate it. I am diametrically opposed to violence (not that I have any idea what I mean by diametrically or even what diametrically means. It sounds nice, though.) and I ever take Gandhi's stance about not being willing to kill for any cause (though he was willing to die for many, and I can't say the same.). Societies that use war as a tool are base cultures in my opinion. Violence is, I think, wasteful. Not only do you have to expend lives and energy and money to beat someone down, but you then have to keep them beaten down. It's too costly and too silly.

And that's all I have to say.

That's not true, but it's all I'm going to say now. おやすみなさい。