Death, Jealousy, & the Future

It is completely normal, even expected, for any given mortal to be jealous of those who come after given the reality that things are getting better all the time. Just as it's an ordinary part of human experience for parents to be jealous of the better lives they've worked so hard to give their children. Hard, but true.

I've recognized for some time that a fundamental truth of life is that we get to have sex until we die, & then the future happens. (All too often the sex was the best part.) & I recognize my own jealousy at all the good stuff that will happen after I die. I was hoping for a lunar colony in my lifetime; at 43 this is not looking like it's gonna be.

So. The point of this is that this systemic jealousy, however unconscious, can result in a cynicism about the future which is unjustified by the evidence. In combination with the saturation of depressive suicidal ideation found in the extremist apocalypsism so prevalent in all manner of folk, optimism can feel like an uphill slog in high gravity. But if we can get past our excessive & unfounded sadness & pessimism, the future's so bright I gotta wear shades.

The Life Trip versus the Death Trip

So, now that you've experienced my perspective on duality, I'd like to focus in on a particular aspect of duality: the Life Trip versus the Death Trip.

I believe in very few dualities, but the tendency to frame life in terms of it's dueling livability versus deathliness attributes is pervasive & hard to escape . . . . . . . . . This is a dichotomous space where I've made a choice. I choose life. Not in some lame anti-abortion way, ignoring the necessity of controlling our fertility & being happy that abortion is so much better than the infanticide it replaces. (Humans have always controlled their fertility, we just don't want to look at how that worked in pre-industrial culture.) I choose life in the sense that I prefer love over hate, positivity over negativity, peace over war, compassion over distance, empathy over indifference. I align with victims regularly, if the alternative is to ally with aggressors & abusers.