Essays, Analyses and Meditations


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Life is Overrated

  • Life is vastly overrated. After all, you are just a coincidence. If you have many siblings, it is obvious to you that not only your existence depends on those two specific parents to come together, but it only depends on the particular time when they did. A year later it would not have been you but a sibling of yours. I suspect that even a second later would have made a difference and you would not exist. You exist because those two specific humans had sex at that specific instant. The odds that you were born are actually very low, so ridiculously low that you are de facto a statistical oddity.
  • If any of your ancestors all the way back to the first form of life had died before reproducing, you would not be born. Your existence depends on each of those ancestors having met the mate they met at the time they did in order to have the children they had who became your subsequent ancestors. If any of those ancestors had met a different mate, or had had sex with her at a different time, she or he would have had different children than the ones she or he had, and therefore your subsequent ancestors would never have existed and you would not exist. You are the accidental product of an amazing sequence of millions of coincidences.
  • And you dissolve easily. Long agonies bestow importance to a person's life, but sudden death by an accident is the best way to realize what a bluff life is. It takes just one second to turn a living being, with all his or her paraphernalia of memories, feelings and relationships, into a lifeless object. The difference between the two "things" seems so big to a human observer, but it is actually just a second and you are now a body to bury as opposed to the engineer, husband, dog lover, mountaineer, etc that you were a second earlier.
  • Living beings are merely walking bags of excrements: sweat, saliva, dandruff, mucus, feces, urine... the list is endless. Even sperm is ultimately an excrement. When you die, it becomes obvious that you were just a walking bag of excrement.
  • The fundamental property of life is that it dies. Everything that was alive is now dead, except for those that are dying now. For us the planet is just a vast cemetery.
  • We cry at funerals not to laugh.
  • Meaning is irrelevant.
See also a complementary article:

The Next Stage in Evolution: The World of Objects