Once you can accept that your own life is insignificant and essentially meaningless, you can stop worrying about how many weeks, days, months or minutes you'll be here for and just appreciate the moment in which you are living. Perhaps you can even be grateful that you have lived at all.
We get preoccupied with the minutiae of day to day life and forget that we didn’t even know we were dead before we were born, and we won’t even know we’re dead when we die. And here we are right now, perhaps only minutes, hours, or days before we go back to being dust.
I find it helpful to think about this when my partner gets yet another parking ticket, I feel directionless in my career, or it seems like my teenage children think I’m lame.
Things are fine. They’re actually great. They can get a lot worse. It is worse for many others. I’m very grateful for the cards I was dealt.
I guess this is being downvoted because HN isn't really a place where existential nihilists hang out. But in all honesty, isn't it incredible that anything happens at all! That gives me more hope and encouragement than anything else!
+1 for the concept of "we were dead before we were born". I've always found that the simplest answer to "What happens after you die?" is "The same thing that happened before you were born: everything".
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.
Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.
The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara.
Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton.
We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people.
In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.
We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds.
How dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state, from which the vast majority have never stirred?
I'm always interested in other alternate Internets. If you're feeling over the existing web there's always Gemini or DAT to conjure up those warm fuzzies of the early net.
As a team we play a game of Geoguessr (https://www.geoguessr.com/) on Friday afternoons. It's fun to have some friendly rivalry and banter and de-compress together after a week of work.
