It's a few minutes into the new year and already I'm pleasantly surprised. I went for a walk outside and into the frigid air and spent the turning of the clock rambling to myself about the year we leave behind, and the promises of the year that lie ahead, all the while understanding that both years have already happened; understanding that there is nothing one can do to alter the course of things; understanding that free will is mostly an illusion; that mostly everything is an illusion; that life is but a dream.
I am going to have a positive mindset this year. I am going to believe that I am inherently valuable, and that I have things to share which likewise possess value. I am going to be unafraid to give myself away. When people know things about you, they can wield power over you in ways that people who know nothing can't. But what is that power, exactly? The casting of judgement? Scorn? Ridicule? These are social powers and, like most things social, they are unreal. They hold as much value as the apparatus of their delivery and, in truth, we are all deserving of scorn and ridicule, the frequent deliverers of judgement perhaps most of all.
I once asked my dad to explain why we were alive instead of not alive. His answer was simple; Our ancestors were murderers and thieves. To suggest you are any different is to lie about the very foundation upon which we stand.
I once asked my dad to explain why we were alive instead of not alive. His answer was simple; Our ancestors were murderers and thieves. To suggest you are any different is to lie about the very foundation upon which we stand.
We are all naked and ugly. We are all shameful. We're all criminals. We're all murderers, rapists and thieves. And we are all dead. These are truths. Everything else is binary code and advertisements, likes and shares, paperwork and policy initiatives. We want so badly to divide ourselves and forget our collective blood-drenched histories that we've evolved two social entities, politics and religion, for the purpose of perpetually blaming "the other" for our collective crimes. The meaningless labels that spring from both have killed hundreds and hundreds of millions and impact us all.
The sad joke here is that there are no politics and there is no religion. Humans love illusion, in large part because we are surrounded by it. The illusion of light, the illusion of sound, the illusion of memory. We are imprisoned and freed by these illusions.
The ringing in of the new year is important to me, for reasons I don't fully understand, and it's one of the few times I allow myself to willingly give in to illusion; the illusion that 2017 is some sort of tangible thing we can put aside and replace with another tangible thing. It's all the same year. It's always the same year. There is no year.
The ringing in of the new year is important to me, for reasons I don't fully understand, and it's one of the few times I allow myself to willingly give in to illusion; the illusion that 2017 is some sort of tangible thing we can put aside and replace with another tangible thing. It's all the same year. It's always the same year. There is no year.
But allow me my illusion. I think 2018 is going to be awesome. We're a few minutes deeper into the new year now, and I remain pleasantly surprised. This is going to be a year of enlightenment; a year of giving; a year of creation. There is also a very strong chance it will be the year we enter a decades long nuclear winter. I better print a physical copy of this, just in case. The alien archaeologists will find it a worthy record of the time.
In fact, they already have.
In fact, they already have.
Happy new year. Have a nice life.
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