"never go full buddhist"*):

Content warning: Maybe don't read this if you're in an existential dread spiral. Or do. Not sure. It's incomplete, ragged edges. Anyway, this is fuckin' random beautiful brutalist shit (in my opinion) written by some random person at some snapshot instant in time, about metaphysics, existentialism, (non-)eternalism, (non-)nihilism, cosmology, mortality

See also: eternity, suffering, death

There is no thing, nothing, that can perfectly, eternally last. Also, there are no gods; no god’s-eye-views; there is no heaven, no hell.

You’re probably going to die, sooner or later, and at uncertain time. This is even with the possibility of life extension, "health extension," though, at the time of this writing, everyone is, in some sense, dying of a terminal illness (aging). In any case, the sun’s going to go out, protons are going to decay, and eventually everything’s going to get cold and/or entropically isotropic. Or the universe is going to big crunch, or whatever. That’s a long ways away, but in any case, we probably can’t escape the universe. It’s just this, nowhere to go. It’s just us.

You probably can’t take anything with you, when you die, including memories, achievements, anything. It’s probably just nothingness.

Life generally involves a lot of uncontrollable and sometimes abruptly surprising suffering.

Nevertheless, excepting suicide, violence, accident, health misfortune, aging, we just keep spontaneously happening, we just keep living, we prefer some things to other things, we act: we seek wellbeing, satisfaction, intimacy, belonging, sex, procreation, interestingness, fun.

So, we want things; we care; it matters. And, also, you can relax! No one gets out alive, in the end. Ah, but you can’t relax! There are still hard problems of living right now and of wanting to keep living.

We’re sort of all in our own nebulous virtual reality bubbles. We make it real because that’s all we know. It’s both real and it isn’t real, like the stakes are real, as far as they go, which makes some things ghastly, horrifying, macabre, hellish. And also it’s possible to see through all that, though in some senses it doesn’t change anything, and/but, at the same time it does--any or all of that can be heaven, at least in principle, with time.

Nebulous virtual reality bubbles, or not, we ever reach across the gap, for each other, and arguably touch, alone and together…

Life is sort of about living in the light of all that, letting everything settle around all of that. Meditation helps everything loosen up, so everything can sort of settle around all of that. Better not to start; if you start, better to finish. Lots of people reading this will have already started. None of this has to be taken as sort of a premise, and none of this is something to hold onto. If any of this is a thing, you’ll find your way there through practice, bottom up, nothing special to be done.

It’s sometimes possible to love and be loved, and to be happy, in hell. And it’s sometimes possible to alight on wellbeing and beauty, for a time, together. Wellbeing and wisdom. Time, space, matter, energy, consciousness, computation, life itself.

Anyway, all of this might be partially or totally wrong! Don’t take my word for it!

*Re "Never go full Buddhist": https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/full-retard ** [Last accessed 2021-05-21]

**This is not politically correct.

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