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Thoughts in This Season of the Pandemic
Mortality has been on my mind lately. Perhaps that’s due to the 
constant reminders, in the ubiquitous masks that I see everywhere I go, that something deadly is in the air.
More likely, though, in these my latter days, when death awaits just down the road apiece, it’s natural for my mind to turn to thoughts of my own mortality
I can’t think of my mortality, however without being gobsmacked by the weirdness of it all. My tiny spark of consciousness — which sprang to life 82 years ago and then grew as the years have passed, touch by touch, book by book, sorrow by sorrow, and love by love — will be snuffed out forever. It seems right and proper that you would disappear. But me? That’s just too weird.
From a larger view, of course, extinction is the order of the day, the most common and natural thing in the world. Things are born, they live, and then they die. That’s the way of all flesh. From dust to dust, as the Bible tells us in its very first book.
It’s just that I seem terribly important. But the universe, in all its implausible immensity, snickers in reply. In fact, it tells me that I’m about as close to a zero as one could imagine. I will die and the universe will go about its business. And some billions of years after I die, the universe will collapse upon itself, falling down to an infinitesimally small point (the Big Crunch), then expand rapidly (the Big Bang), then collapse, then expand — forever and ever, all the while taking whatever remains of “me” back and forth with it, being rocked by the immense pulse of the universe itself. Now is that weird, or what?
So there it is: Oblivion for trillions of years before my birth, oblivion for trillions of years afterward my death —and an infinitesimally small period of consciousness in between. Each second that passes during our lifetimes, then, is precious beyond belief. (I know, I’m beginning to get repetitive, and I’m also beginning to sound like Carl Sagan. But it does boggle my mind. Total boggles.)
So those are my existential thoughts as I go about the business of living in my eighth decade. None of this worries me much. It’s all beyond my control, and I’m just along for the ride.
Postscript: My post is, of course, written from the perspective of one who doesn’t believe in supernatural religion or an afterlife. For believers, one’s consciousness goes on past death, so it’s an entirely different story, a much more rich and satisfying one. But I come from a secular family of Okies, and I’ve never been able to make that leap of faith that belief in a supernatural religion requires. So I’m left with an entirely corporeal universe that cares not for me.
Published in General
Pascal’s bargain only still holds if you limit yourself to believing that the world is binary, that there are only two opposing options.
This post leaves room for a range of discussion. Two things have been high on my list to form and make acceptable character and, since my marriage in 1966, I have tried to follow them: honesty, sometimes called trustworthiness or integrity, and a commitment not to hurt or harm my fellow humans.
We have had much discussion about Joe Biden before the election. One particular area where he seems to have been deceitful is surfacing in energy policy. Moves are being made in the direction of support for global positions on climate change that will hurt many Americans. Is Susan Rice behind this? Since it is not really clear what Biden’s state of mental cognizance is, do we know if he or someone else is behind Presidential actions? Biden does not take unscripted questions so this can be judged. My concern on this issue is that it hurts many Americans in loss of jobs, increases in energy costs, and higher taxes. I don’t see any benefits for America. Do I charge Biden with poor character or diminished capacity?
Other views?
Yes. He had poor character before his capacity diminished.
Kent, your post seems to have come before mine!
And then you wrote!
I’m a couple decades younger, but have these thoughts all the time. I’m not bothered by the fact that I will wink out. It’s the likelihood that whatever I made will go poof. All it takes is for the inheritors of my website to forget to pay the hosting bill or domain registration fees, and it’s gone. I’d like to upload the entire thing to the Internet Archive, but A) that seems available only for institutions, and B) that’s no guarantee. I’ve tried to future-proof everything as much as possible, but formats change, and media degrades. The only sure-thing, shortish-longish term, is to print off everything and seal it in a chest and donate it to the U of M’s cavernous (literally; they’re carved into a rock wall) archives, if they’ll have me.
That I like. I can rest easy knowing the work is taken down to the depths and properly stored, to wait. It also means my survivors who gathered at my deathbed will wonder forever why my last words were “top men.”
@jameslileks, I wish there were a way to print all of one’s Ricochet posts with one press of the button, but that’s probably asking way to0 much of Max.
It’s all in your perspective. I don’t like the idea of dying someday, but I try not to worry too much about it. I am almost exactly a decade younger than Kent, and I have no kids. But I know that my accomplishments will remain after I am gone, including my personal blog. I also like the idea that all the physical molecules in my body will live on as part of Nature, so I will not truly be gone. I don’t know about an afterlife, but I pray my soul will live on.
“We hope to be remembered and we know we will be forgotten. All you can do is face the dusk and throw the ball as hard and far as you can.” That’s a quote from a lileks.com Bleat post from a decade ago, once that made such an impression on me that I quoted it to my Facebook friends and have never forgotten.
Like the OP, I am not religious; I believe that I am the sum of my thoughts and feelings, and therefore the closest I can come to immortality is to preserve as much of that as I can in a form that will outlive me. But the sad truth is that there is no way to ensure that, not even with tangible artifacts like books and papers. How much literature from antiquity has vanished forever? Hell, it’s hard enough to find some TV shows from the ’70s.
I have been keeping a journal since the 1980s, and I suppose it’s the closest thing there is to an external backup of my brain. Occasionally I have a weird feeling when I’m writing it: like any writer, I have a vague sense of audience, but I don’t know who the audience is for my journal. I have no plans to publish it, nor would anyone read it if I did. I suppose I can imagine that after I’m gone, maybe one person might read it, once, and then forget about it. That’s probably as far as I can hope to perpetuate myself.
But it doesn’t stop me from trying.
We were promised that there would be a way to export all of one’s own posts and comments. If that feature has been added already, I haven’t figured out where to find it.
It exists, in theory. Go into your profile, click on the overflow menu (the three dots), and then Settings. Buried in there is a menu item that says “Export data.”
Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, all it really does is submit a request for your exported data. When I did it, I had to ask multiple times in the Bug Reports group before mine got sent to me.
I find it essentially impossible to understand how a life without a belief in a higher being and purpose can have meaning beyond that of the individual professing this belief. The comments on this thread seem to confirm that my position is accurate. We can see how empty are the professions of those who push to govern our society while eliminating religious beliefs among the people. The future we can anticipate in such an environment will simply be a contest in killing humans until all are enslaved by a dominant ruling class.
I think that on the contrary, the belief that one lives for a certain eternal purpose is purely a religious belief.
Perhaps what you meant to say is that you believe in the religion of self. One’s eternal purpose was generated solely by his very own thoughts and feelings, sometime after he was born, and that purpose is to propagate those same thoughts and feelings. Who created you? Your body created you. You are “like God” (Genesis 3.)
I will pray that some day soon you will decide, as I did, that this religion is perfectly incredible. I think that that will be the first day when you have no religion. You might experience it as I did, as a sense of standing at the edge of an infinite void, and feeling utterly and permanently alone, and indescribably hopeless.
I think for some people, like me, that is the first step to finding God: recognizing what it really means to be apart from him.
You say you have no belief in a “supernatural religion.” I wonder why the adjective.
I’m not sure what the solution is to this. You can’t force people to believe in God. I did until my 20s and then just gradually stopped buying into it. I’m still what I would call culturally Catholic, and have great affection for the Church. But I don’t have faith, and honestly I’m really okay with that.
I’m not suggesting any solutions along the lines you mention of forcing people to believe in God. We who do believe are facing being forced not to believe in God. Beyond that, what I was addressing was a condition in the life of a non-believer where some of the earlier comments were fretting about the finite nature of their life and work. There is just nothing there after you are gone. That is nothing. Something may last for a finite time after but eventually poof. It is their belief that it is a finite existence so why fret about it. Those of us who believe in an eternal existence are under attack, not by those non-believers here, but by the Left (Commies) trying to change America.
Perhaps, but at no point did I say that I live for any eternal purpose. Nor would I, because it’s not what I believe.
Please don’t make the (unfortunately common) mistake of thinking that being non-religious means one doesn’t believe in anything. I have my beliefs, arrived at through my own experience of the world and my own (considerable) contemplation. You have yours. I would not dream of trying to convince you that yours are wrong.
@suspira, good question. I probably didn’t need that adjective, but there are a few New Age religions without deities. And there are congregations of Unitarians that don’t insist that their members believe in a Supreme Being.
I, on the other hand, am always glad to try to convince other people that I am right and they are wrong. I thought that was the whole reason for Ricochet.
You’re wrong about that.
That’s true, of course, but I would think “supernatural” encompasses more than a deity. New Age spirituality certainly contains tendencies that are not strictly materialist. I just thought it was an interesting word choice. Perhaps I’m overthinking. I do that.
It might seem daunting at first, but you could get a ream of good-quality paper and resolve to print out five each day. It wouldn’t take long. Set up a notebook, write the date at the top and circle it (the way we used to number manuscript pages), and before you know it, you’d have them all together.
If you want to then put them back into a word processor format, you could scan them or take to a copy center to make a disk for you.
It’s like restoring a large garden after the winter. Just take it one little patch at a time. Pretty soon, you’ve got more done than there is still to do, and that progress keeps you going ’til you finish it. :-)
Thanks Marci. I might give it a try. I like the garden metaphor.