There’s no worse feeling in the world than knowing that you’re getting older, and you’ll eventually forget everything you’ve come to know about yourself. The human mind is fickle and susceptible to manipulation and alteration on both the physical and chemical level; everything we have come to know about the world in our lives — the good times, the bad ones, and all of the experiences within — could be entirely false, and we would go on believing that we truly lived it for the rest of our lives.

I guess that’s just part of being human — fundamentally biological and made of matter, of meat and clumps of organs squishing around together. See, in that sense, we’re nothing but ticking time bombs — except our explosions happen at one point in our lives, and the rest of the time, we just slowly fizzle out until we die a silent death, that of a mere disarming of our capabilities, until we’re shut off for good.

That’s the truth I’ve come to understand after having been on this planet for thirty years and having the misfortune of having to be here for at least another forty. When I put it like that, it seems as if my entire lifespan is so simplistic and ephemeral that it can be put summarily into a sentence: In reality, our experience is more like a novel, and when it’s done, there’ll be no sequel; not for the dead, nor for the living — not for the weak, or even for the suffering ones.

Photo by Mihail Macri on Unsplash