Over the weekend I attempted to normalize my sleeping habits. The two weeks prior to that I’ve been sleeping at 4-6 AM or all-nighters. I managed to pull this off Friday night when I went to bed at 11AM. I then proceeded to entertain [Ozy] at my apartment over the weekend since he’s thinking of transfering to Davis. It didn’t bode well for my sleep. Oddly enough, this being Thanksgiving week, I’ve managed to not sleep early despite having no homework. Even tonight, I was up reading a webcoming knowing that work needed to be done. I realize that a lot of my posts about my sleep habits don’t really go anywhere, but at the very least I’ll need some kind of record of events so that I can more easily trace my descent into madness.
In other news, I’ve having a fun time being a college student, classes are kicking my ass, and I beat Final Fantasy XIII. Am I happy? Time for a Paradigm Shift.
I’ve always been saving this particular bit of philosophy for a story, or more specifically a character to serve as my mouthpiece, but I have been actively trying to craft a situation to bust it out, but it hasn’t been sticking no matter how hard I try. So I suppose here’s a place now’s the time to finally put it down before I forget one day.
I do not want there to be an afterlife. Whether or not one does or doesn’t exist, or exactly what the afterlife entails isn’t what I mean. I hope that an afterlife doesn’t exist. I, for the most part, like being human. I believe that the human experience is one of the greatest things in the world, but it’s not built out of the best parts. Emotions, needs, and beliefs all wrapped up in the ever unreliable shell of memory. The key thing here is belief. What we believe makes the world work for humans.
I don’t mean religion, but it serves as my strongest visual aid. Imagine if your religion is wrong. Imagine if when you died, you weren’t in Heaven, Hell, or anything that you’d expect. What if the spirit world was like Bleach’s Soul Society? What if it was a water park? You have to come face to face with the fact that everything you believed was wrong. Would you want to? Remember, you’d be sitting on your false belief for eternity. Forever would your immortal soul know that you were wrong. If you spent your entire life believing in reincarnation, then all of a sudden you found yourself at the Pearly Gates (or Hell), you’d be pretty pissed off.
I see that I’m not really doing a good job of explaining, but bear with me. Think about your relationships. Think about who you love and who you hate. Why do you love them? Why do you hate them? For example, let’s say you hated X because X wronged you in some way. In the afterlife, you’d be outside of time for the most part, and then you’d see that X didn’t wrong you, you misunderstood. Or you loved Y, but then Y turns out to be utterly destable. Now you may be thinking, that’s not possible. But think about misunderstandings. Think about ignorance. You take path A instead of path B. In the mortal world, you don’t think about path B unless path A turned out to be shit, but if A was good, then you’d maybe entertain path B, but the bottom line is, you’d never know. You’d never know what path B would be like if you walk down path A. In the afterlife, you’d know. You’d know if things were better or worse. And there in lies the problem. You judge and value your decisions. Everything your life was built on becomes better or worse than something. “I shouldn’t have gone to law school.” “I shouldn’t have married that guy.” “My dad never hated me after all.” And so on.
Regardless of how happy I am, I am who I am because of where I’ve taken my life and where life has taken me. But if there’s an afterlife, I suddenly become aware of who I could have been, how much happier or worse off I could have been. And I don’t want to know that.
I’m afraid of it. I don’t want to see how wrong I’ve been. What if I got better grades? What if I had still been friends with him? What if I hadn’t gone to that party? What if I had gone to that party? What if I didn’t try hard enough to be a better person? We don’t have to think about the what ifs as much while we’re alive, because there are more important things to focus on. But if there’s an afterlife, what else are you going to do? I don’t want to be at peace with everything in the end either, because that means I’ll have transcended who I am and become something not at all what I am now.
I don’t know if it makes any sense; putting it into words I see the weakness of if, but that in itself helps explain what I mean. I’ve internalized this belief, then when I’m dead, “Haha, man you had a shitty take on life. Let’s go never worry about anything ever again because we can’t have any more defining conflicts and characteristics.”
Timestamp – 6:41 AM
