I’ve always thought of death as a relief, and could never relate to people who try really hard to survive (like eating your own poop in an earthquake or something). To me, it would be a relief to not have to feel and go through the drudgery of time. Life mostly feels tiring to me. It feels like an intentional staged act, and I have to be on this stage even though I don’t really care what happens to it.
(For more context, I also don’t care about legacy, if I go to heaven or hell, if I get good or bad karma, if the human race exists in a hundred years, or whether the universe expands or contracts or evolves. It is very difficult to live life if one doesn’t care what happens in between or after. I don’t neccessarily believe 1 is better than 0 or being alive is better than being dead.)
It has been a mystery to me, why do I feel this way and most other people don’t. What exactly went different? Is it genes? Some neurotransmitter dysfunction? Subconscious memories of the other side? I’ve come to think of it as natural biodiversity: if nature is diverse, then there must be people who are naturally attuned to life, and then some who are not.
Recently I’ve been asking myself: what life would I be interested in living? Will I be uninterested in life no matter how great it gets, or is there a spectrum of it that I will find it worth surviving for? Is it this world I am opposed to living on, and as a thought experiment, if I were born on an alien planet, would I still be uninterested in life?
If this world is what I am opposed to, what kind of world will I want to live in? And by extension, what can I do to shape this world into that?
I have no answers. I am not sure if it is my limited imagination, but for now I cannot imagine a world and a life I would be naturally inclined to live for.
Maybe it is okay to be uninterested in life, and maybe it is necessary in order to be able to truly observe it.
(The other day, someone told me that life sucks, and I strangely found myself taking the opposite position. I think I could intellectually see why life doesn’t suck, but it is an emotional dissonance that plagues me.)
On the other hand, this could be just the beginning. I have spent most of my life fighting against life, or living in a shell that other people have constructed for me, and it is only in recent years that I feel I have some level of agency to compose my life. I feel like if I do it right, I could have a very different few decades oncoming compared to the first few. The first few were trapped in many imagined limits, and now I feel like I am finally free of many of those limits.
What can I do with my life now to answer my questions? Will I be able to at least attempt to live a life that I feel is worth living for? What if it is actually up to me to live one?
(Maybe it doesn’t matter to me what happens in between or after, but as long as I am philosophically opposed to quitting life, then I will have to at least try my best to answer my own questions.)