It's on the menu...

I like speaking with older people. Spare me the boring drama of my peers today, their small talk of who happens to be in the sheets with whom, their foolish overanalysis of two words spoken to them by a cohort; if I want to deal with stupid drama then I'll just look at myself. I also despise mundane observations and overdue revelations, much like the twenty-three year old who says "those were the days" and tries to convince me otherwise when I am fully aware of the fact.

But hey, I guess retards need attention, after all... they're not going to impress. The truly strong must face adversity, or those who face adversity become strong; the ancient chicken/egg complex.

What I'm dreading about college is the retrorevelations. That is, to say, that I'll be surrounded by a batch of bandwagon atheists who realize the work of Friedrich Nietzshe and draw attention to themselves, as if expecting a reward for doing so. Much like a child or an animal, they'll look up to authority for recognition. I can't take attention whores of that nature, and these super-attention whores are going to be a pain in the ass.

But finding someone six or seven years my senior to speak with on an equal level, to trade mental blows with, that's something that I pursue. To test the boundary between experience and prodigiousness, to acquire knowledge that sets me apart from my peers, that's my goal.

In Economics class, Mr. D'Andrea discussed the age-old small talk concerning the lottery and what one would do with their winnings. His thinking on the subject was how unfortunate it was that people could only seem to think of things to buy.

What would you do if you won the lottery? If you all of a sudden had twenty million dollars to spend at your leisure, what would you do with it? Invest it? Buy a nice car? Buy a mansion? Retire? Party all the time? Give it all away?

Me? I'd take whatever I needed to get into college, and I would never leave. The rest of my life, as far as I can measure, would be spent in the classroom, learning languages of far-off lands and all the knowledge that is possessed in those lands. Eventually I suppose that I would get so good at going to school that I might even try to teach it. Whatever money was left over, I would use to purchase whatever I need or want, and the rest would be used as a scholarship fund. It would be simply, really, I would sit down with the young man or woman and talk. You can learn an awful lot about a person if you just shut the hell up and listen, so I'll examine their gestures and extrapolate that into a person. If I like that person, they have a free ride to college, no strings attached.

That isn't to say that I would live a life of subsistence. Overindulgence of luxuries breeds all ills known to man, but simple, comfortable living is much more neutral in alignment on the good ---- evil spectrum. I would buy books to complement an ever-growing library, whatever entertainment utilities and facilities that I should require, and any assets to living that I should otherwise expect and pursue. Living a life of poverty, chastity, and servitude is not what I seek. If we are to die, why should we suffer while we are alive?

My ultimate goal in life is to avoid any and all retrogression, to reject the objects of long past affection and attention and to accept change as a necessary and natural occurence, while still allowing for a sense of permanence and security.

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For anyone who hasn't read Sasha this weekend, I would suggest doing so now. It's a noteworthy piece. For those of you who have read Sasha, this is a piece-by-piece analysis and breakdown of it.

Sasha, I counter your supposed negativity and socially unfavorable post with answers:

People have been so concerned with discovering the meaning of life, and it still hasn’t been discovered yet. This is not due to its elusiveness as a target. Everyone is simply stumbling around shooting in the dark. We know there’s nothing there, deep down. We know; but it’s simple despair that has led us to disbelieve reality in the desperate need for us to have something to shoot at.

The unconscious mind is dangerous territory. However, I agree with the whole "religion and faith out of desperation" concept, so I'll leave that be.

Enough metaphors? I’ll get to my point. There is no meaning of life. You will have arguments to persuade me from this fact, for fact it is, and so I am here to absorb all those arguments and rip them to shreds. Here goes:

I like to think of myself as a logical guy. My ideas have been formed by reasoning and a little thought. Lets start with the basics: what is your purpose in life? The answer: your job from birth is to die. It doesn’t matter how, and it doesn’t matter when, but it will happen. That’s the obvious truth.

No meaning of life, a purely atheistic point of view. Hell, any organized religion, Satanism included, has a purpose to their existence. So, the fact that you have a purpose to life, be it to die, defies the path that you take for the rest of the piece. The existentialism that you touch on later is contradicted here too.

So, then, what’s the point? You may say this: “My life affects those around me. Even if I accomplish nothing, I will have made my mark on others.” So what? Which others? You mean other people. But, you see, they will die too. Everyone dies. And they’ll be replaced by people who will never have known you and you will be forgotten, and your body will decay and your molecules will be dissolved into something else. Will you matter then?

Ashes to ashes and dust to dust, everything shall end.

But Caesar matters, doesn't he? And Washington, Jefferson and Jesus? Jesus? Dickens? DaVinci and Picasso? They all matter, don't they? So not all things are forgotten, especially with the internet. Hell, there are sites that have dead webmasters.

No, your best bet is to become famous enough to be put in a history book, and then hope that the history that you are a part of isn’t changed after a particularly vicious political upheaval. In which case, at best, you’ll be remembered for 2000 years, using current precedents.

Lets continue farther into the future and into the future of the human race. If I were to ask you what you saw in humanities future, what would you say? Before you answer, let me tell you what I would say: “In several billion years, the sun will have expanded to a size large enough to swallow up the earth. Assuming that we have mastered space travel by that time, I’d say the human race would be in no danger for another hundred billion years, at which point, assuming that modern scientists are at all good at their jobs, the universe’s expansion will have reversed itself leading to a titanic crunch of everything, obliterating it all.” I’m no expert, so my numbers may be off. But what does that tell you. It tells me that we have no future.

Oops, spoke too soon, you address history too. Well, using that logic, why are you writing? What's the point of your supposed "education" of us regarding your ideas? None of these ideas matter anyway, right?

There is no future, but that does not mean that all progress is doomed to be erased in the great equalizer, nor that all advancement is for naught.

Eli Whitney made the cotton gin in the late 1700s. That invention can be extrapolated into single-handedly increasing the average lifespan of the population in the Western world by a significant amount. Henry Ford mass-produced automobiles in the 1920s and onward, and revolutionized the automobile industry. Johannes Gutenberg produced the printing press on a large scale, Edison invented loads of items that you use today, and yet, you leave technology alone. Without these contributions, there would be no cars, there would be no electricity, no books, no internet, no language, nothing. We would still be drawing on cave walls and killing each other with sticks.

So the next time you try to act apathetic and reject advancement, you must first realize that you are typing your ideas in words formed thousands of years ago, on plastic that was manufactured by some useless machine, into a useless database filled with more useless information on a grandiose scale.

Lets scroll back to 1991: Cold War ends, Soviet Union Collapses, the world can stop living with the fear that two superpowers will launch a nuclear holocaust upon the world. Still, I can’t help wondering: who would have cared if we had annihilated the planet with ourselves still on it? Would you care? Would I care? I’m pretty sure that I’d be dead, so what’s it to me? If the human race were to become extinct, who would cry? If a tree falls in a forest, and no one hears it, does it make a sound?

In this case, that tree does make a sound. Because as long as there is one being that can perceive death, it exists. A cockroach understands death because it runs from it, and they can survive a nuclear holocaust.

Thus, our deaths are not all meaningless. As we die, there is an instant that we realize what is happening. During that second, our lamentations take hold of us and release.

Now lets get down to the nitty gritty: God cares. God. God cares so much that he made us. God cares so much that he made us above the other animals, he made us smart. Smart enough to build weapons capable of blowing ourselves up. Smart enough to Question the existence of God. Smart enough to make God up. Remember the need to have something to shoot at? Shoot at God. Why not? Its simple really: we’re better than the animals, and God’s better than us. Why? Because I don’t want to die. So God will help me out. God will send me to heaven. Or God will reincarnate me in another life. Or God will give me 72 virgins in the afterlife. Why not? He’s God, I don’t know what he’s doing, so I’ll make it up for him.

Let me tell you something. If God cared for us so much, he’d make it easy for us. We’d life eternally this time around, instead of having to die, sometimes painfully and gruesomely. If God cared so much, he’d make us perfect, and not “test” us by making us live life and suffer on a world that he created. If God cared so much, he’d just separate the bad guys from the good guys right now, because he’s God, and he already knows who they are. If the kind of God you all wish for really existed, we’d know it, and not have to guess.

God doesn't exist. God is a tool for the weak.

If you still think that I think to much, try it yourself sometime. Take a few minutes, and just think: what is my purpose in life? Why do I exist? Why does this planet exist in order for me to live on it? Why does God have to exist? Why? You do that, then you’ll know why I think too much. I want to know why. I want to know that there is a reason, and that there’s more to it than just existing, and then ceasing to exist. Tell me that there is something to shoot at in the dark, prove me wrong. Prove it. Because if there isn’t…

Think about it.

You exist because it's all you know. The reason that you haven't died is because you fear it, more or less. This planet exists because of a freak accident and all of us exist because of a physical anomoly. That is all.