ExistHarm
suffering
- Mar 12, 2023
- 216
i love sasu.
i feel such a sense of peace here, knowing that i was never wrong for wanting to die so vehemently and for so long, for never being able to see the silver lining, for always feeling the never-ending sense that something was deeply wrong with my existence.
i have stumbled through my short life, constantly falling over, crying hot tears, and being forced to get up and keep running.
i have gas-lighted myself in 10,000 ways that there was something wrong with me, that if i just found the right mindset, did the right things, found the right person, said the right things, i could find a sense of lasting peace. that it would all make sense.
the truth is hard and cold. the truth is that we are soft and delicate, deterministic biologic ape-machines on a small, small rock, in a vast and and cold blackness.
the chance for any us to exist at all is unimaginably tiny. for life to have spontaneously begun to replicate itself deep in the ocean 3 billion years ago, for the first worms to develop neurons and the ability to feel about 700 million years ago, for the first homo sapiens to develop language, and concurrently, self awareness, 50,000 years ago. for your parent's specific gametic cells to come together. the amount of things that had to be just right.
i am reminded of the reddit post about winning the lottery, that starts with:
"Congratulations! You just won millions of dollars in the lottery! That's great.
Now you're fucked.
No really.
You are.
You're fucked."
...
we have all been imposed a terrible, terrible fate, to have to exist at all. literal quadrillions have been, are, and will be, imposed the same fate, sentient beings that have the capacity to feel, and to suffer. cows, pigs, elephants, dinosaurs, worms, mantises, flies, chimps, dogs, cats, alligators, robins, squids, sharks, boas, puffer-fish, humans.
some say ignorance is bliss. quite the opposite has been the case for me. i grew up in ignorance, and i grew up in pain. pain of misunderstanding, hatred and resentment springing from this misunderstanding. as the truth became clear, the wounds scarred over. it hurts less now, and in some ways i do feel blissful, not being so lost and confused, and in pain.
but in some ways, we have it even worse than the trillions of other sentient beings on this planet; we know our fate. we understand our mortality. we understand that there is nothing after. that our small outburst of consciousness is like a single match in a vast siberian midnight; alight, burning hot, flickering and waving and contorting, taking in oxygen and matchstick wood at a constant pace, then gone with the slightest breeze.
it is quite literally impossible to imagine nonexistence. it is impossible to imagine anything without a human bias. all of the world is filtered through these ape eyes, through this gooey and pink slop of fat and water called brain. there is no other way to understand anything.
so we distract ourselves from this terminal knowledge by understanding the patterns of the universe better. building better and better tools and machines, better ways to communicate, better foods and and clothes, better math and science. this has really only become parabolic in the past 200 years or so, when we were able to exploit the stored carbon of trillions of shelled creatures literally buried under the sands of time, to outpace the fixed energy output of the sun and supercharge this process of pattern recognition.
we are but tools of entropy. life consumes life, other organized structures, and literally shits them out into less ordered states. we try so hard to convince ourselves that we are more than our legacy, than the singled cells, the worms, the lizards, the rodents, the monkeys, and finally the hominids that are literally baked into our genetic code. that we are something more than the end product of billions of years of biologic momentum.
the deep ocean vents where the first bits of biology were built. boiling discharges of heat and material, pouring into a vast, freezing, functionally infinite expanse of seawater. THIS is our legacy. pouring heat and material; our words, ideas, excrement, fluids, our love, hate, blood, sweat, tears, and finally our bodies themselves, into a vast, empty and functionally infinite expanse of space.
----
in the face of this terrible reality, there is nothing but to understand that the capacity for suffering is the only significant thing in this universe. to make up for this terrible, terrible legacy, we only need to understand; do unto others as you would have done unto yourself.
this is why i love it here on SaSu.
here, you do not have to lie to yourself or to others, to pretend that you are okay with your own suffering. that we have a right to not be okay with it. that we have a right to look in the face of the billions of years, quadrillions of ancestors, and incalculable amounts of pain, and say; NO.
no longer will i accept my imposed role as an agent of entropy. no longer will i be the living, existing legacy of untold numbers of horrors. no longer will i deny my greatest desire, to be free from desire. no longer will i play this fucking blood sport.
i will fade quietly and happily back into the dark.
"i" will be nonexistent.
the thing that is "me" will no longer hurt me anymore.
~EH
i feel such a sense of peace here, knowing that i was never wrong for wanting to die so vehemently and for so long, for never being able to see the silver lining, for always feeling the never-ending sense that something was deeply wrong with my existence.
i have stumbled through my short life, constantly falling over, crying hot tears, and being forced to get up and keep running.
i have gas-lighted myself in 10,000 ways that there was something wrong with me, that if i just found the right mindset, did the right things, found the right person, said the right things, i could find a sense of lasting peace. that it would all make sense.
the truth is hard and cold. the truth is that we are soft and delicate, deterministic biologic ape-machines on a small, small rock, in a vast and and cold blackness.
the chance for any us to exist at all is unimaginably tiny. for life to have spontaneously begun to replicate itself deep in the ocean 3 billion years ago, for the first worms to develop neurons and the ability to feel about 700 million years ago, for the first homo sapiens to develop language, and concurrently, self awareness, 50,000 years ago. for your parent's specific gametic cells to come together. the amount of things that had to be just right.
i am reminded of the reddit post about winning the lottery, that starts with:
"Congratulations! You just won millions of dollars in the lottery! That's great.
Now you're fucked.
No really.
You are.
You're fucked."
...
we have all been imposed a terrible, terrible fate, to have to exist at all. literal quadrillions have been, are, and will be, imposed the same fate, sentient beings that have the capacity to feel, and to suffer. cows, pigs, elephants, dinosaurs, worms, mantises, flies, chimps, dogs, cats, alligators, robins, squids, sharks, boas, puffer-fish, humans.
some say ignorance is bliss. quite the opposite has been the case for me. i grew up in ignorance, and i grew up in pain. pain of misunderstanding, hatred and resentment springing from this misunderstanding. as the truth became clear, the wounds scarred over. it hurts less now, and in some ways i do feel blissful, not being so lost and confused, and in pain.
but in some ways, we have it even worse than the trillions of other sentient beings on this planet; we know our fate. we understand our mortality. we understand that there is nothing after. that our small outburst of consciousness is like a single match in a vast siberian midnight; alight, burning hot, flickering and waving and contorting, taking in oxygen and matchstick wood at a constant pace, then gone with the slightest breeze.
it is quite literally impossible to imagine nonexistence. it is impossible to imagine anything without a human bias. all of the world is filtered through these ape eyes, through this gooey and pink slop of fat and water called brain. there is no other way to understand anything.
so we distract ourselves from this terminal knowledge by understanding the patterns of the universe better. building better and better tools and machines, better ways to communicate, better foods and and clothes, better math and science. this has really only become parabolic in the past 200 years or so, when we were able to exploit the stored carbon of trillions of shelled creatures literally buried under the sands of time, to outpace the fixed energy output of the sun and supercharge this process of pattern recognition.
we are but tools of entropy. life consumes life, other organized structures, and literally shits them out into less ordered states. we try so hard to convince ourselves that we are more than our legacy, than the singled cells, the worms, the lizards, the rodents, the monkeys, and finally the hominids that are literally baked into our genetic code. that we are something more than the end product of billions of years of biologic momentum.
the deep ocean vents where the first bits of biology were built. boiling discharges of heat and material, pouring into a vast, freezing, functionally infinite expanse of seawater. THIS is our legacy. pouring heat and material; our words, ideas, excrement, fluids, our love, hate, blood, sweat, tears, and finally our bodies themselves, into a vast, empty and functionally infinite expanse of space.
----
in the face of this terrible reality, there is nothing but to understand that the capacity for suffering is the only significant thing in this universe. to make up for this terrible, terrible legacy, we only need to understand; do unto others as you would have done unto yourself.
this is why i love it here on SaSu.
here, you do not have to lie to yourself or to others, to pretend that you are okay with your own suffering. that we have a right to not be okay with it. that we have a right to look in the face of the billions of years, quadrillions of ancestors, and incalculable amounts of pain, and say; NO.
no longer will i accept my imposed role as an agent of entropy. no longer will i be the living, existing legacy of untold numbers of horrors. no longer will i deny my greatest desire, to be free from desire. no longer will i play this fucking blood sport.
i will fade quietly and happily back into the dark.
"i" will be nonexistent.
the thing that is "me" will no longer hurt me anymore.
~EH
