Unimpressed

I keep reading books about people growing up, finding partners, having families, growing old and dying. I keep seeing it in movies, and so many other places, and it's no wonder really, it's just about everyone's life.

I've always known I want to be a father, but, as time goes on and as I continue to be single, with no real prospect or hope of that changing, I must remark on my feelings on the matter. See, as far as I'm concerned, one's life ends after childbirth. After that, one must become mom or dad, and who you were prior to that more or less ceases to exist, and is replaced by a benevolent will that seeks only to ensure the success and well-being of one's offspring. In that respect, I also feel that one must accomplish in life all those things that one truly wants prior to childbearing, which frankly, for me, is a lot, albeit poorly defined.

I think part of the reason I'm so relationship averse is that this eventual relinquishment of self for the benefit of one's children is the most concrete and real proof of one's mortality, something which I continue, even at 24, to be reluctant to admit. I'm not ready to accept that I'm going to grow old and die, no matter what I do or think, and I'm certainly not ready for my life as I know it to be over, though what I stand to gain by remaining single really doesn't seem that profitable at the rate and direction I'm going.

There are just so so so many things that I want to do with my life, and I feel like getting married and starting a family is giving up on my hope that there is something greater in this life for me than to doom myself to death. Maybe this is the juvenile part of my ego talking, the selfish part of me that wants to keep on living no matter what, but this frustrates me, because biologically speaking, it seems as if my desire to stay alive is far greater than my desire to reproduce, which would be the ultimate biological purpose of our being here.

Having said that though, my previous entry is about how absurdly bored I am, so it's kind of contradictory for me to moan about not wanting to give up this life I have for myself while at the same time complain about not having anything meaningful to do. But it's how I feel, and I have a right to those feelings.

Again, it all comes back to this feeling I have in my gut like if I settle down, so to speak, that I'm giving up on my dreams. Somehow, for me, being in a relationship, getting married, all that jazz, represents an admission on my part that there's nothing else out there and that I should just be content to grow old and die without putting up a fight, the whole, having kids is taking a stand against the inevitability of death thing aside. In terms of allele frequencies, that argument is all well and good, but my consciousness doesn't rest in my alleles, it rests, I dunno, wherever it is consciousness rests, and that part of me will die with my phenome.

Which leads me to the whole, soul/life after death thing, that I still have a hard time with. If I have an immortal soul, what part of me is it exactly that endures past death? If I were to subtract from me all those things in my personality that have changed since I was born, and will have changed by the time I die, and leave me with the essence of all that has remained constant, what exactly is that? Is it enough to constitute an entity in and of itself, such that I would, after death, remain aware and capable of experiencing some sort of reality? If I knew there was something else, I would willingly participate in the cycle that nature has set up for me, I'd think of it as an enjoyable experience worthy of participating in, and jump right in, but instead, we are born into a reality that provides no such assurance, and forces us to chose to live a life according to mere speculation, at the end of which none but ourselves ever get the answer, should we be even lucky enough to be aware of what it is after the fact.

There are too many religions in the world to make me think that any one of them is THE right one. If any one of them really did have the answer, an answer that was bigger than life in some real way, the others would have given over long ago. But that's not the case. The fact that religion pops up wherever humanity does doesn't tell me so much anymore that they're all pieces of the same puzzle, it tells me that the search for life after death is a part of basic human nature.

In 24 years of being manifest in this reality, I've learned the rules, the limits, more or less, of what's possible and what's not. I'm slowly coming to accept that magic does not exist, will not exist, nor has it ever. It's just not phsyically possible. Not on this Earth.

Anyway, I could go on like this forever, pretty much, so I'll leave it at this: I feel like accepting reality is giving up. I feel like participating in the natural cycle of things is accepting it, and thusly giving up. I feel like the reality into which we are born sucks, it's boring, and increasingly less fascinating as time goes by. There's not a lot left to discover, and that partnered with the suckiness I've discovered so far, makes me all the more reluctant to accept that this is all that's capable of being. Basically, I resent that I've been born into such a crappy, limited, painful, meaningless and, though at times entertaining, largle unimpressive world, and I'm just not willing to accept that's all there is to it, much less work to perpetuate it and thusly impose this worthless reality on others.