The Descent

          I am writing my thoughts about subjects like a fellow philosopher/writer/human being (Montaigne). I do not directly care about grammar or if the subject makes sense, for I am writing truthfully for myself and with that the glorious irony is if you do find solace in this writing you have failed to grasp the main concept im putting forth; who cares. (you changed it to fit your own perspective anyways). 

To You, Sincerely, Me

I find myself drifting further from society as each day passes. I feel as if i'm constantly on the brink of insanity, yet, at the same time, I feel as if everyone could be in their own way. The point of me venting this to you is that I hope you can understand why I act the way I do. There are things in this life that haunt me, and until the day comes where I have more memories behind me, than possibilities in front of me, I don't expect them to go away.  

 Preview of Upcoming Book

 It's 3am in a place where no god exists, a young man lies next to a girl whose name he can't remember.

He thought to himself- in a quick attempt to hold onto his last moments of escapism- "do people actually love you, or is it just for them? What is the point of it all, If it ends?".

These are the questions a young man raises, as he sneaks out of a young women's room, to evade an awkward morning moment.

The young man walks to his first day of class in his last semester before the great beyond of being a his future self. He thinks about all the philosophers he loved, all of the words he read that forced him to believe in a great nothingness, all of those writers, of all of those words that are now watching him, staring, as he simply becomes a cog in the seemingly redundant machine.

Death

          The root of all actions revolve around one thing; the fear of death. Since we are self-aware we understand that our conscious had a beginning. However the drawback to this self-awareness is that we can not accept the idea of our conscious ceasing to exist. This fear leads us to do folly things such as fall in love or create a personal life beyond just procreation, and is a heavily discussed topic within the cusp of the general population, but there is little about it in modern academic psychology or sociology conversation. I like to think that science has had difficulty with the topic because self-awareness is a loosely defined ideal, so rather than find physical proof we turn towards philosophizing about whether or not we truly care if we die (we all to some extent do) or rather, why we live in the first place if we are all to meet a demise.

          Firstly, the topic of death can be a rather uncomfortable subject. Which is understandable because it could mean the end of all existence--assuming of course you understand the world exists only through your perspective and are not some transcendent being-- and no one likes to talk about that. Everything we do is because we are striving to better our current and future selves within the facade that we will eventually be in a better place of being. For example, you become heartbroken not because of some reptilian evolutionary defect, but because of the same reason you fall in love; your conscious and emotions created a world in which you didn't feel completely alone. This idea of loneliness can be associated to the irrational yet understandable fear of death, because death itself means all of these things are pointless and when the day comes you are utterly alone. The roots of this fear (that very well may not have existed within certain civilizations both currently and historically) can either be traced either to Capitalism or the birth of Religions or it could just be the result of generations of hunters and gathers passing on knowledge (paired with evolution). Regardless of the history, we all ended up in the same place; fearing death.

          I wish that I could console you along and tell you that I myself have accepted death because I am self-aware and understand both the absurdity of life and its purpose, but I would be lying. You see, to me death is the scariest damn thing in the world. It means ( lets all assume religion is false of course, regardless of yours or my beliefs) that my conscious was created just to acknowledge my death. If I have to explain that than simply associate it with yourself, do you remember before you were born? No? Than your conscious grew along with your brain and therefore is simply waiting to die with it. All optimism aside, I do have one point to make along with a final inquiry. As you grow older and nearer to the end, you do gain some sort of acceptance with the idea but just have trouble grasping it. I will leave you with one thought that may lead you down a mental spiral so just at the end of your mental tangent take a second to calm down and remember you're going to die regardless. My final question to the reader is this, If you only see the world through your own perspective and all empathy and sympathy is simply a factor of your own said perspective, how can you understand or even comprehend the existence of other consciousness outside of your own ideals? In more straightforward words, is the world around us simply a creation (or at least bent for you to understand) of our own conscience?

Experiences

           I do not pretend to understand the functionality and relationship between our consciousness and time, but I would like to delve into a small section of that; the moments in which we experience things and thus the effect of the experiences themselves. Before reading I would yet again remind you that behind this veil of words lies a young man on the brink of insanity, attempting to bend the world into something understandable and not just a hopeless meaningless abyss.

           No two people can experience things exactly the same, so truly you are a pioneer of sorts in life. What I mean is, we each experience things differently because it is impossible for us to have the same thoughts or exact visuals as those around us, it makes each experience unique. The error in this is that we cling to these experiences and attempt vainly to hold onto them, which in turns gives us a brutal awakening (because we will never be able to hold said experiences in the same way ever again). The simple fact is time forces moments to come and pass, and under that logic, we can never indefinitely hold experiences beyond the passing moments. In relative terms; humans live in present, but look to the future, it's a flaw that has brought with it the fear of aging and the undoubtable vainess of youth (for the young believe they are special and unique because they have less memories or experiences behind them then the "infinite" possibilities ahead of them). Think about it this way; you are currently reading a paper written by someone whose influences and individuality is constantly changing, yet in this moment I have solidified my current opinions and philosophies indefinitely and no amount of time passing will change that (will touch on later). However, by the time this is read my previous mindset will somehow have changed (even if slightly). The point is that no matter how many experiences you have in your life, the moment (emphasis here) it's over you are entering a new experience, and thus with every blink and thought you have, said experiences have made you into a different person than you were in the previous experiences. I understand thats kind of a difficult concept to grasp but in reality you can find evidence all around you; for, you are an ever-changing organism that will never be able to hold or change experiences that will (or have) define(d) you, yet you will cling to the idea future experiences are better than previous until you reach a point in your life where you have less opportunity for experiences ahead of you than you have behind you (a realization in every person's life).

           Moving forward from my rant I would like to close with the current experience you are having (this is me touching on it later). At this exact moment the words you are reading are being read (unless being read aloud obviously) inside your own head, with your own conscious voice. That's important because it means that not even my knowledge or writing will be interpreted the exact way I wanted, alas it will be in your own interpretation (selfish). The reason I am highlighting this idea because as you are looking through two eyes that hold your entire perspective on the world (weird right), I am also currently writing this and we are experiencing two very different things. I am writing a unimportant collective of thoughts that no more than ten people will ever read, and you my friend are reading this collective attempting to understand what the hell I am even talking about. So look around you, hold onto your current thoughts ,for you will never be this you again.

Love

Now this is a very interesting topic that is diverse and possibly contradictory to itself and to my other beliefs about life, but just because there is contradictory thinking does not mean both points are not correct (perspective). For simplistic purposes im using the term "love" as relative to the feeling you get when you are attracted to someone, not the love you feel for friends or family (or philosophy?).

For starters, in attempts to highlight ever changing ideals, when I began writing this (whatever this is) I would have told you I was in love and those around me would have said I was (at the least) a different man. But as life would have it, young love dies as quick as it began.Now as stated before love is nothing more than some insane evolutionary defect (or for you optimists out there it could be argued as a beneficial growth). This "defect" allows us to fixate on certain aspects of another human, possibly making them more attractive to your eye than to others. With that said, does love really exist? Is it not simply a construct created from years of historical fantasy?

Before answering these questions you must again remember to trust your own ideals and only use mine as a point of reference (essentially im talking based off formal experiences and how I conceptualize the world). Now to jump in, what makes humans believe they're in love is nothing more than the brain, it's not a higher power or a fated moment, simply an activity in the brain (science is still unsure of the full effect of this however). From that we can probably assume that since the brain controls who we fall in love with (and literally everything else), than love is nothing more than a thought that's connected to simple emotions, and those emotions are based off of both social constructs and inner evolution, therefore (sorry for the long equation) leading to the conclusion that love is essentially formed from ideas. For example if you take two people who are "madly in love" and you ask them to write down their thoughts on the other they would write overwhelmingly positive things. But if you ask them to write about those they were previously "in love" with (while they are now in love with someone new) their thoughts would not be overwhelming positive but either simple statements or possibly even harsh ones. This means that love, just as perspective and thought, is simply and  ever changing mechanism of thought and cannot be seen as something that exists, but rather simply an idea that everyone holds at some point or another, and just as all ideas, it will either pass or manifest itself into insanity.

Who Am I

Contrary to my usual topics I have decided to be a bit more selfish and delve into myself and who I am. I'm sharing this, rather than keeping it locked inside a shelf in my head, so that maybe you can find yourself within my own writing. As I write this I am in a place where I am questioning my fleeting intelligence and wondering how I became the person who is sitting on this chair (repetitive I know bear with me).

If I were to tell you my life story, you would probably think very differently of me, however this is not that kind of piece, everyone's story is boundless and complicated (especially if you add the thoughts behind the actions) and I do not hope to compete with the humility of the human race.

So who am I? I am a human who struggles with finding his place in the world, a young man who has had his heartbroken yet yearns to fall in love, a college student who has done things that his younger-self would suggest that he has fallen to the pits of normality, a philosopher who attempts to analyze everything in his path hoping to gain some sort of answer or meaning. That is who I am, but that is not who I always was.

As a child I remember never being happy with the way things were (not situationally but with the horrors of society ) and aspiring, not to change the whole world, but at least have a profound and immense impact on a single life. That was to be my legacy, to take someone who was born into sadness, and give them (if even for a moment) a brief break from their harsh reality. It was my dream to share my love with those in need, to be a truly selfless human being. Unfortunately as I grew it became apparent that to become selfless you need to jump through infinite "selfish hoops", and in that I fell into societies vacuum and became what I once dreaded; an egocentric cog lost in the vastness of my own mind.

There is no end to this piece however because I am still searching for a way to become that selfless person I once knew I would become, so my friends I am turning to you, If you can possibly find it within yourself to change someone's life, than you have completed my journey and have given me the first beautiful answer to my quest of which I am forever bound and burdened by, the quest for a meaning.

Existence
 
 If you think your life is important, ponder this. No matter what you do, or how well/wrong you live, no one will remember you. Eventually the sun will explode and the earth will cease to exist, then possibly trillions of years later the universe will implode and existence,space,time everything will be gone. There is nothing you can do that has any 'higher' importance, so decide upon your values and fear your death, there is nothing else.

Why do I deserve a hero's death?

Why is the persistence of my own identity so important?

What did I do to place myself in such high esteem?

Have I been kind enough?

How do I cope with my consciousness ceasing to exist?

Why do I deserve a hero's death?

What have I done in my life?

Have I failed?

How does everything make sense yet I refuse to believe it?

Why don't I accept the only thing that matters is that I die and it's over?

What if I know that is the reason I can't find happiness?

Have I given up?

How would I know?