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I hadn’t done a whippet it since my friend overdosed on nitrous. I lay back and a million tiny neon squares danced on the ceiling. “I get it,” I thought to myself. I understand why someone would want to dissociate.
The girl I just met is 21. She’s the first person in her first-gen immigrant family to go to college. She sold cocaine and guns for a while until her apartment got raided. She’s dealing with a herpes outbreak. Someone lied to her recently.
Another immigrant comes over. He’s from Yemen. He told me he started working at 12 years old, doing construction. He worked from six in the morning until six at night for a dollar a day.
It’s hard for me to understand wanting to continue the human race. There’s so much suffering. If you really liked us, wouldn’t you want to put an end to that? Why not redistribute the resources so everyone who currently exists can have an okay time and then just kinda fade out?
I judge people who have kids instead of saving existing children from abject poverty. But who am I to judge? I could give a good number of Yemeni children a day off with what I spend on drugs in a month. How do you face the level of unnecessary suffering that exists in the world and continue to function?
I was posting about moral relativism recently, as I do, and someone commented that essentially moral relativism is nihilism. I chuckled to myself. Nihilism is a phase, ideally. I spent about two seconds there when I gave up on the idea that I had the right answers to the big moral questions.
I don’t know what to do. I don’t know if there is a right answer.
As I laid on the couch dissociating I smiled to myself. It occured to me that as much as I am tormented by existence and the responsibility I feel to make my existence meaningful, I want to live. I don’t know why. I guess I evolved to want to continue to exist. And that felt beautiful to me.
I thought about my friend who overdosed. And how she wanted to live too. That’s what everything comes down to. Chaos fighting order. Entropy coalescing into information. The will to live against all the forces making that hard.
But there’s that will to live. And that desire to help others. Sometimes they fight with each other. But they’re beautiful. I get a few years on this planet to be extremely distraught about how to spend it. How interesting. How lucky.
Chaos wins in the end, but creating order is a better way to pass the time.
There’s a reason we project order on the world.