#existential rambles

[essence-inked]

Sometimes I feel crushing existential dread, but then I remember I can collect shiny trinkets from all the special places I go and gently place them in one of my compartmentalized containers and label them with what makes the memory they’re attached to important to me, and that doesn’t really fix the existential dread, but it does mean I can experience it along with the notion of having trinkets

[essence-inked]

Damnit, scrolling through the posts from the internet people in my phone wasn't supposed to give me this many emotions...

hey man I found a piece of your soul stuck in the text messages of old friends you don’t speak to anymore. do you want it back

[anxiety-banana]

hello i would like everyone to know that sometimes you can sob your eyes out and have an existential crisis one moment and then suddenly you're booking your driver's test and applying for jobs and crocheting a blanket and maybe life isn't so bad anymore!! maybe you can feel awful and fix your life anyway!! maybe you're allowed to be a wreck and still be good enough!! i am a full on adult and have avoided getting my license for years but now i'm finally doing it because i've grown around the fear!!!! the world didn't crash and burn when i was fifteen!! i did this for myself and i'm going to be okay!!

[sortanonymous]

This is a comment I stumbled upon a while ago and I just can't stop thinking about that fact. And honestly, it's the main reason I just don't really believe in an afterlife. (It doesn't plague me with dread or anything, it's just something eerie that fascinates, yet unsettles and unnerves me.) Every bit of our consciousness and very existence is dependent on just electrochemistry. Everything that makes you you is from how those chemicals and electricity work and react to everything. All those electric and chemical reactions like a computer. It is amazing how they come together to make us such complex humans. And yet, when a computer completely dies, nothing's left of the data locally. So it makes perfect sense that once that electrochemistry breaks badly enough, that's it. No more thoughts, no more dreams, no more being. You cease to exist forever, and you don't even realize it. Just like you were never conceived. Again, it doesn't dog me down or anything, it's just so unnerving yet bizarrely fascinating to me in its sheer finality. And of course, given how unlikely it is for us to get that chance at existence, may as well make the most of it instead of dwelling on how it ends. Because why waste such powerful electricity and chemicals like that?

[lazylittledragon]

can anybody who's made it beyond 22 please tell me i'm going to be ok

[edwinisms]

you ever think about how edwin got like. no warning, no time time to process, nothing, when he reappeared on earth faced with the fact that virtually everyone he knew in life is dead. his parents? probably died in the 1950s or so (at best) almost forty years prior to edwin’s return. if any of his classmates were still around, they’d have been elderly, possibly senile, and in a few years they’d all be gone– except, of course, edwin. nothing looks the same, cars look like spaceships, there actually are spaceships, he can no longer see the stars, and everyone he knew is dead.

[nerdyenby]

Going insane about how the world of Minecraft keeps growing. Taller, wider, deeper, older than we the player will ever truly know. We are tiny in the grand scheme of things, yet we have been given this world — this universe — as a blank canvas.

We have the power to shape the world to our will, to literally move the mountains, yet we could never explore it all. There is no end for us to find, there is no beginning we can make any sense of, there only is the now and the remnants of the past buried beneath our feet.

The world is coming back to life around us, but with it emerges reminders of the immense loss this universe has suffered.

We find plants thriving without sunlight; we find darkness unfathomable with creatures who cannot comprehend the light and kill without mercy, alone for who knows how long. We discover a new mineral only now beginning to form again, presumably after being harvested nearly out of existence, but we find no trace of where it all went - of what it was used for. We find otherworldly new crops that have been in the soil below us all along; unable to reemerge on their own and us ignorant to their existence.

We find a way to bring back a species long extinct, but how many of them died first? We find ruins and remnants of structures created by intelligent creatures, but these people are gone. We don’t know what happened to them, who they were, or what knowledge they may have had to pass down to us.

We know nothing of the people who came before us. Their structures are submerged under the ocean and beneath the earth. Any language they may have left behind has long since been lost to time. All we know is that someone used to be here, that this world was lived in and loved, and now it is ours alone.

We are the sole inhabitants of a world we used to be able to believe was fresh and new and untouched by man, but as the game progresses we realize that was never the case. We were never the first ones here. This world has a history, one of love and life and pain and death we will never get the full story of. We’re starting to develop the tools to uncover some of the pieces, but we will never be able to grasp what came before.

Maybe we were never meant to find out. Knowing we aren’t alone in the universe changes everything, but does it really? So we are not the first to build our homes and live our lives here. This is still our home and this is still our life.

This world knows loss unfathomable, but she found us and took us in. This world has seen far more destruction than we will ever know, yet she entrusts herself to us, allowing us to create. This world has a past, but we are her present, and we get to help shape her future.

[essence-inked]

Opalite as a concept is just so incredibly cool to me, because nothing about it is rare or old or monetarily valuable. It doesn't cost much to make, it's not remotely in limited supply, it's just glass with some neat silicon spheres in it that make it look pretty. It doesn't really look like opal at all, and sure, it kind of resembles moonstone, but nobody sells opalite as some sort of synthetic moonstone or the like - it's not really an imitation of anything. But it shimmers in the light and it looks a little different when you look at it in different ways, and it doesn't need to be rare or old or cost a lot to be special. And there's nothing less genuine about a gemstone made in a lab vs. the ground - glass is made of sand is made from rocks just like all the other stones out there, and isn't it just wonderful that humans made their own new gemstone to add to all the ones they found in the earth? Isn't it wonderful that because of people, there is now another lovely thing in the universe?

[essence-inked]

man if that isn't just a mood...

[toastandjamie]

Ohhh it’s sad post canon WoT thoughts:

Nynaeve is going to be the last of the EF5 alive.

At best Perrin and Mat have until their seventies, so fifty or so years, Perrin might live that long- Mat however is contending with Seanchen assassination culture, and like, he’s lucky, and alert, but all it takes is one slip up so realistically Mat will likely be the next of them die and likely not of natural causes.

Perrin would likely live and die naturally, the Two Rivers is a safe place to live so unless there’s another drastic world threatening event he gets to live out the rest of his days in peace with Faile.

We don’t know about Rand, if his lifespan was shortened by the loss of his channeling or of that strange new power gives him a similar slowed aging effect. We also don’t know if the others ever learn that Rand is still alive.

And well, we all know what happened to Egwene.

That’s leaves Nynaeve. The oldest of the five. The one who helped raise those kids. She left Emmonds Field to protect them and she outlived them all. She’ll outlive Lan too. She’ll at least have Elayne but that won’t change the fact that those kids she cared so much about are gone. That potentially three of them died violently, that she couldn’t protect them. The long lifespan of an Aes Sedai is a cruel thing, especially for someone like Nynaeve who cares so deeply about the people around her.

[this-is-a-name-dont-worry]

things that seemed reoccurring this update:

- Meat

- peas

- jelly

- Hibernation

- Eddie's absence

- Acting out a script (Sally mumbling asking if it's her cue and Howdy changing the script of the narrator in Homewarming storybook, characters general interactions with the narrator, different moments in the video, like the Sally and Frank ad break or the song a barely silent night, where the two literally fight over who get to sing, Sally mentions she wrote the lyrics, and Frank says she already has a song. yeah all of these are easy to see as meta goofs in the original material, but it's the fact there's so much of it this update) (of course all this wrap up with the end of the video where Eddie and Frank are obviously acting off script)

- Being alone (Eddie not having any news of anyone and not even seeing anyone outside (which is interesting as the story says that Sally was up in a tree near his home and saw him fret over having nothing to do), Wally saying it's so quiet during Homewarming and it's just he and Home for a while (potentially the show putting out a christmas special and then being on break? can a show do that?), and in the normal website material, the end of "An ode to hibernation", Frank saying "Where all that's left is me", the "me" being a "...me?")

- Welcome Home being used to sell stuff (cigarettes, medicine, eggnog, cereals, and the cookbook lists ingredients that are a specific brand)

(I'm putting under read more my rambling thoughts so you can just reblog the list without having to see them)

so I can't really make sense yet of all the food stuff. Maybe there are cultural elements/expressions I don't know that explains it? But I still find it very interesting how fucking unhinged that cookbook is yet the commercial and the website treat it normally. The cookbook is overall extremely interesting, because some of the recipes seem to actually be written by the characters; Barnaby who only presents you weird hot dog dressings with pictures but no recipe (and all jokes), Frank who lists not just the ingredients but also the material, and overexplain each steps (at least overexplain compared to the other recipes. it's actually interesting to know why you do x or y), and Julie who turns her recipe into a game at the end, and felt a bit harder to follow? anyway.

The cookbook, the Homewarming tradition of hanging a ham in the tree, Santy Claus being said sometimes instead of Santa, the ham for Santa? Once again, the christmas commercials being so casual about some of the weird stuff it says and presents? This almost feels like an alien who only has a blurry grasp of Christmas and what humans enjoy made the cookbook and the live commercial.

Sometimes, Welcome Home feels like it never actually aired and produced things, but we're making it retroactively exist. Something is making it exist. Like a retcon of the universe, "What do you mean you never heard of Welcome Home? No, of course it always existed and was very popular, look at all this old material we find!"

So maybe whatever is making it exist doesn't fully get humans and accidentally creates things that are weird to prove its existence. Like a cookbook that tells you a single pea in a buttered plate is a classic meal, or that of course you give Santa ham on Homewarming! (tbh almost getting an AI weirdness feel)

But in total contrary, in its story, Welcome Home also feels like it always existed, but got somehow completely wiped from people's mind, as something caused its sudden stop, and its characters gained consciousness of what they are and their world. As an existential dread fell on them one after the other, slowly realizing something isn't right. As Eddie felt anxiety and nervousness over no one being there or contacting him, to then having the story acts lightheartedly about it, the narrator saying things have been solved but he doesn't feel it, and suddenly Home is staring at him.

Both "It never existed but the universe is being retcon into it existing" and "it existed but something terrible happened that erased it from peoples mind" seem plausible. If two theories contradict each other, that means there's a third one that needs to be found.

Maybe it existed. Maybe it truly was popular, but something corrupted it, leading to its disappearance. A disappearance so big it stopped to exist. And now the thing that corrupted it is trying to crawl back, make it exist again, but it's making it come back completely off.

Anyway.

Also, I think the show may have been on hold during the Holiday season, "hibernating", and the character who got some self awareness realized that something was off. They're alone because there's nothing new, so no one is there bringing life to the neighborhood.

[crow-with-a-pencil]

Hi @naffeclipse I'm very normal about your fic. Have some frantic midnight sketches as extra kudos along with some tag rambling :)

[essence-inked]

Actually, it's worse! The universe is going to get like insanely old, but even if you just take the 13.7 billion years that have already happened (and round that to 10 billion because fuck you, I'm allowed), if you live for a century, then you experience 1/100,000,000 - or one hundred millionth - of the show.

If we keep going with the show metaphor, most shows - plays, movies, concerts - are around three hours long, so let's go with that. 3*60*60 = 10,800 seconds, which we can again round to 10,000.

That means in all the time that's already happened, you get to see one ten thousandth of a second of the show.

But, okay, what if the greatest show is just a hominid thing? Hominids have been around for roughly four million years, and all the neat stuff like tool-making has been around for two million years and change. So, rounding that down to just one million years, if you live for a century, you'll have experienced one ten thousandth of the show. Or, in our three hour metaphor, you'll have experienced roughly one second.

You have just enough time to experience a burst of light and sound and the realization that Things Are Happening in that tiny, infinitesimal glimpse into the show, and then it's just... gone. And so are you, with all the knowledge and memory and love you've gained, because it may have been a second to the world, but it was everything to you. This is what haunts me late at night - that we all exist within a single breath of the world, and that no platitude can ever really make that stop being true.

But since I've dished out some existential dread, it's only fair for me to share the bit that gets me back up and moving, too.

It's NOT okay, and it COULD be better, and if I could have a thousand or ten thousand more years, I'd take them in a heartbeat. But the thing is, as it stands, we only get one second of the show, so we might as well make it count.

Do you know how much can happen in a second? Innumerable amounts of atoms collide, and lightning flashes in the sky, and you can say "I love you," if you say it really fast. We've had to make words for things that happen in a thousandth of a second, or a millionth, or a billionth, and we've even made it down to Planck time, which is so mind-bogglingly small that my brain breaks trying to imagine it.

And we're not alone, either. If a million people shout at the same time, even for just a second, it'll be audible for miles around. It destroys me inside that it's impossible to share everything we each experience with the rest of the world, but we can still share the bits that mean the most to us, and we can still pool our seconds to do something bigger than just ourselves. The most surefire way to make our second count is to not spend it entirely alone, and if that's all we get, then let's try to make it worth something.

And, hey, who knows? Maybe if we do a better job of working together, we'll be able to figure out how to get a bit more than just that one second someday.

i hate mortality what do you mean i was invited to the greatest show ever but only got 5 seconds admission. I need to see what happens next

[realmsalot]

Ok ok ok so in class today we had to write a journal about what we thinking about at the time and I was FINALLY able to put this in words it has been eating my mind for a while

It is so fascinating to me that Peri/Poof is such a stickler for Da Rules, because the reason he exists in the first place is because of a loophole. Like literally if Timmy didn't realize there's nothing in Da Rules that says a God Child can't wish for his Godparents to have a baby Peri wouldn't exist.

And like yeah okay we all know that but the part that really eats my brain is it's (unintentionally?) implied that Peri's continued existence is due to an exception to Da Rules.

In Channel Chasers when Wanda is explaining to Timmy what happens when he grows up she says that "...and all the remnants of their magic dissappear forever..." which I interpret as all still active wishes are undone. And if you remember, Peri is a wish.

In order for Peri to continue exist and be able to grow up, either an exception to (or another loophole in) Da Rules had to have happened.

So I find it so fascinating that he sticks so closely to rules as written because he himself is by all means a loophole and an exception.

Anyways here's how I originally worded it in class.

[whereserpentswalk]

People always say we're like ants to eldritch horrors. But that's weird to say because enough ants have killed people by working together. And the main thing we are to ants is just bigger. Are we smarter? We're also smarter then fish by any metric than we're smarter than ants. And sharks are deadly to us, not as much as you'd think but they can be, they kill us without wanting to, without malice, they just think we're other things that they want to eat, things that also aren't human, they only hurt us when they're wrong about us. When someone's attacked by a shark it's not like being attacked by a bear, it's somehow less than that, they know nothing. Sweet innocent angels of the the sea, they dont know what we are, they dont know why were here. We are incomprehensible to them. We operate on a timescale a sharks will never understand. We know things sharks will never know. And it won't protect us. Even though we kill more of them it can't protect the individual. Mabye that's what it would be like to kill an eldritch horror, to see a creature at the edge of the sea, that you could never truly understand, and strike it down mistaking it for a demon, thinking its humanity's cosmic prey, because you don't know what it is, because you can't know what it is. Even when it's just peacefully resting your heart knows there's something deeply disturbing and dangerous about it, and your heart is entirely wrong.

[cryptid-catnip]

surely if there are gods, they are the cruelest of beasts.

making us the only species who has the knowledge of the end, the knowledge of how hopeless it is, and knows that it's approaching, that we're all whistling past the graveyard.

a species that knows just how little they know about the world and the universe