On the Downward Spiral

I don't know how many people wake up in the morning thinking that today could be the end.  I doubt someone gets out of bed and wonders am I going to be murdered by a random act of senseless violence?  Is my mundane trip to the grocery store going to end my life?  It feels like today there are so many external threats to our safety, even though if you look at the statistics, it's technically safer now than it's ever been.  Somehow I can't shake the ever-present feeling that I shouldn't get too comfortable and should always be prepared for something horrible to happen.  It's not because my life has a history of terrible incidents.  I doubt someone who finds themselves in the middle of a mass shooting or forest fire could have seen it coming because they just faced that same kind of problem last year.  I try to not give into fear mongering, however, I can't help but wonder how is my story going to end.  I'm old enough now that death is not some vague thing that could possibly happen at some distant time, but instead it could be literally around the corner.  This of course starts the runaway train of thoughts that has me wondering will I be ready when it happens?  What will happen to my family?  Granted when it does happen, I'll be dead so most of my Earthly concerns will no longer be anything I have to worry about.  The thing is, I'm still alive, so I'm still worried about what the consequences of my death will be on the world around me.

The whole thing got me thinking about not just my own end, but the end of things in general.  For instance, what is going to happen to my car when I'm done with it or the next person after that?  What happens to the things in our lives when they're no longer in our lives?  Maybe they end up in a festering pile somewhere.  If you live in a fairly green place, you may have a vision that all the stuff you use will somehow magically get recycled and put back into the perpetual loop of usefulness.  I recycle, but I'm pretty confident that most of the stuff that goes int the bin ends up rotting away somewhere out of sight and mind.  For the most part I've been one to try and pass something along if I'm no longer using it.  Eventually though, everything comes to its end.  What is that though?  Most of us probably don't get to truly see the final destination of the things in our lives.

If you were to go back and talk to people from the different eras, it's very likely that they all shared similar fears about the world seemingly spinning out of control.  Each one convinced that things had never been as bad as they were right then.  Today is no different.  The country feels increasingly divided on fundamental issues.  Each side is convinced that they are right and treats anyone opposed to them as the enemy.  It's gotten to the point that I have to wonder if there is any empathy left in the world beyond the initial shock of sadness as you look at your phone and see that heartbreaking headline with numbers that represent people impacted by some tragedy.  I've said before that you have to mentally and emotionally shield yourself otherwise you can drown in the sadness of the world.  Still, it seems like the constant barrage of disasters and violence has gotten us to the point that we willingly forget until the next time something happens. 

Mass shooting, we argue about gun control and the Second Amendment and how it wasn't the weapon that killed those people, but rather the mentally unstable person.  Never mind that we've created a society where it's just accepted that if you want an instrument of death, you just need to go to the store and pick one up.  If someone questions that ability, it immediately devolves into a screaming match between two parties who don't want to hear the other side, much less change their mind.  So while we argue endlessly, the people who have been hurt by gun violence get drowned out by the rhetoric and posturing.  It's easy to debate theoretical ideas in the abstract.  When you're running for your life while someone is shooting at you or hearing that someone you love was a victim of unspeakable violence, it must seem that much more hopeless knowing that regardless of outcome, nothing will change.  The next person this happens to will experience that same hopeless terror of being a statistic in some debate.

Hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, mudslides, and forest fires all remind us that the Earth doesn't give a shit about our petty little problems.  Storms are more frequent and stronger, but as a nation we still can't agree on the scientific facts because doing so would mean some major changes have to happen.  That could cost someone money or force them to abandon what they've been doing their whole life.  It's one thing to be skeptical of something you don't fully understand.  It's another to dismiss it outright because it doesn't match with what's already in your head.  It's another thing entirely to purposefully work against the greater good of people and the planet in order to appease those who profit from harmful industries.  It honestly feels like our country is being run by cartoon villains.  The problem is we don't have Captain Planet or The Avengers protecting us.

Some of the worst aspects of all this is the affect it's had on me internally.  I find myself more likely to stay away from people.  I'm constantly concerned that people are in it for themselves and will take what they can, when they can.  The logical part of my brain keeps trying to remind me that most people are good.  They want what's best for their family and the people they care about.  Still, as I'm driving down the road, I just see the opposition.  Everyone is trying to take.  There isn't enough for everyone and someone is going to get left behind.  The whole world is not the enemy, but it sure feels like it's not a very hospitable place right now.

On Today

As a species we seem to hate ourselves.  It's almost as if we are pre-programmed to be self-destructive.  Even when faced with overwhelming information that is contrary to our beliefs, we still manage to barrel forward into harm and then cry out about how the world isn't fair, that we weren't warned.  I often wonder how we've made it this far when literally every day you can find examples of people falling back on their base instincts to mistrust and hate things they don't understand, including others.  It scares me to think that at this point we are the most enlightened than we've ever been in all of human history and we're still having debates about the very nature of our species.  How can there still be people who believe that a person from a different race is less than someone else?  How can there be men, who are so afraid of women doing anything, that they would threaten them with death?  I'm not talking some developing nation that hasn't figured out electricity or clean drinking water.  This is happening here in America.  This is happening in my town.  How can we still be so backwards in our thinking?  The most frustrating part is that no amount of logic is going to change their minds because they don't want their minds changed.  I've talked before about how perception shapes our reality.  So if someone comes along and says or does something that upends that reality, we tend to react with hostility and even violence.  I sometimes wonder if mankind just needs a different thing to focus on hating.  It wouldn't exactly fix the fundamental problem we have, but it could potentially push off our eventual extinction at our own hands.  Sorry alien travelers, but humans are a bit like determined toddlers, we need to be distracted and redirected otherwise we will put our hands on that hot oven burner, even though someone smarter than us keeps saying "No, that will hurt you".  We need something or someone to focus our anxieties on.  Someone to blame for our troubles.  Because obviously it's not our fault.

I'm still trying to figure out how to explain to my daughter that our society will likely be working against her in ways I've never experienced.  How do I tell her that even walking down the street means being careful because someone bigger than her may see her as an object rather than a person?  Which is at the heart of the problem, we stop seeing each other as people.  There are so many humans on the planet that we can't possibly know them all, therefor most of them are strangers and not people we can care about.  I don't know if there were less of us if it would be any different.  Maybe it is all a matter of scale.  Numbers too large lose all meaning to most people.  Picture a million people in one place at one time.  The individuals stop being a person and just become part of the mass of people.  If a million people die, it's hard to really comprehend what that is like.  Instead think of everyone you know and love.  All the people you like and interact with on a daily basis.  All your Facebook friends, even the ones you don't really know why you're friends with.  All of those people would still only be a fraction of a million people.  Now imagine all those people just died.  That is what's happening around the world.  People, along with everyone they know, are dying on a regular basis and our brains can only register a number.  Because if we were to try and truly empathize with that level of suffering, I think we would break.  We read about disasters, accidents, and attacks with the number of people dead as a highlight of the story.  Dam breaks killing 48 people.  Shooter kills 12 people in a shopping mall.  I can't imagine losing 12 people I know in a single event and yet when I look at the headline, I have to somehow disconnect the reality that those were people.  They have families and stories that came to an abrupt end.  Their lives end and the people left alive will potentially use their deaths to further promote their agenda or try to prove a point.

I've taken a break from writing because I really haven't anything to say.  And in rereading this post, it feels like our world is rather bleak.  Then I remember that we as a species are miracles.  The fact that the universe aligned in such a way that we are able exist should be celebrated.  It's taken for granted that we're here.  Think about what has to happen just for you specifically to exist and continue living.  Maybe the meaning of life is living.  Maybe it's trying to find hope and joy among the sometimes overwhelming sense that the world and our own species doesn't care about you.  Will we ever be enlightened enough to stop hating ourselves?  It's possible.  I think it just takes not giving in or giving up.  Maybe it takes standing up and knowing that your purpose is to make the world better, not just for yourself, but for everyone around you.  Maybe then we have a chance.

On the Binary State

"There are two types of people in this world: Those who like Neil Diamond, and those who don't. My ex-wife loves him"

- Bob Wiley

It's interesting to me how we quickly divide up a population of people into one of two things.  And not just people, but things in general.  Awhile back I was having problems finding anything to watch on Netflix.  While I think Netflix is an overall great service, there have been a lot of times where I wonder what they must think of me.  I've given Citizen Kane five stars as well as The 40 Year-Old Virgin.  For other movies I would give more moderate rating.  While I enjoyed that romantic comedy with the reformed action star who smolders on screen, it wasn't something that I would feel the need to watch again.  Three stars.  The problem with this was that after awhile Netflix found that maybe I would enjoy more three star movies.  I don't seek out movies that are visual smooth jazz.  I want something that I can enjoy and not reach for my phone as something more entertaining.  So in order to stop Netflix from wasting my time I started rating everything on a scale two or four stars.  Three didn't exist anymore because it was worthless as far as making a recommendation.  Don't tell me about movies that I may walk away from saying "well I didn't hate it".  My time is becoming more and more precious.  Since I still want to enjoy movies with a finite amount of time to do so, I can only watch those things which a computer tells me that I'll love.  That has become my movie watching world; love it or hate it.  If you're not one thing then you must be the other thing.  The sad thing is though that seems to be the world in general.

When I was little I knew there were good guys and bad guys.  The bad guys were easy to spot because they looked bad.  Or they had names that made it obvious.  If you grew up with the name Skeletor or Dr. Mindbender then I'm guessing your career choices are really limited.  Plus people's expectations of you would already be colored.  What were the motivations of these "bad" guys?  It didn't matter because they were bad.  The good guys stood for everything right and true.  Even in history class we were taught about how the Nazis were bad (which they were, no doubt there) and the Allies were good.  If you go and read more than your eighth grade history book you find out that not everyone saw things so clearly.  Germany as a whole wasn't full of people bent on world domination and destruction of an entire people.  Sure there were people within that country and within that particular power group that felt it was their duty and right to exterminate whomever they saw beneath them.  We don't want that story though.  We want to know that we're the good guys and we defeated the bad guys.  It helped that they wore uniforms.  Oh you're one of the bad guys.  Here's your black uniform with skulls and lightning.  Most German soldiers were just people from Germany who felt compelled to fight for their country, much like our own people who have served.  To the enemy though our troops are the bad guys.  Most likely though there aren't any good guys or bad guys.  It's all just a bunch of guys (and gals) who are doing things that vary from good to bad.  Even that is probably up for debate.  A soldier or a police officer has to make decisions about that sort of thing in an instant and then live with the consequences, or maybe not if they made the wrong choice.  It's made much more difficult when they are forced to make these decisions so quickly that everything is boiled down to a black and white scenario.

Is everything really black and white?  We encourage people to play games where there is a definitive winner and an obvious loser.  We watch teams, who work together and overcome their differences in order to accomplish a common goal.  That goal is defeating another team, who was doing the same thing.  Only one can be considered a winner though.  The other teams, even if they are working well together, are now considered inferior because we can't allow for there to be something other than a winner or a loser.  Granted I'm not saying we go so far as to give everyone a trophy for simply showing up because that doesn't help either.  Still we're showing our children at a very early age that even if you give your best and work hard that you can still be considered a loser.  For some children that will create drive in which they decide to work even harder so that they can become the winner.  For other children they give up or accept their place in the world as someone who's best simply isn't good enough.  Is it possible to play a game for the enjoyment of it without having there be people divided up into two different camps?  Maybe it's just built into our brains that things are one thing or another.  Our very survival meant being better than the next guy.  While we're not really allowed to savagely murder each other for the sake of our own genes making it to the next round, we can certainly feed that primal urge in our brain by watching a couple teams play for relatively low stakes that feel very important at the time.  Have we not really evolved beyond needing that feeling?

Life itself may not even be as simple as we once though.  Sure when something is dead then it's dead, but now we've learned there is brain dead as well.  Your body could be alive, but there isn't anyone in there.  Are you still alive at that point?  We can barely begin to agree on when life starts or what on our planet is alive in the sense that makes us comfortable.  A virus may not really be alive if all it is is a set of genes that are using another life form to replicate itself.  Somewhere in the vastness of the universe something could look at us and think we're not really alive because we don't meet some lofty criteria that they've set out for themselves.  We don't even have to go into what happens when our physical body dies to have the issue being incredibly nuanced to the point of being vaguely unknowable.  The world is full of nuance.  Most things aren't clearly black or white.  There are shades of...I'm not even going to say it because I don't want some search engine to mistakenly identify my writing with that book/movie.

I think about art or food or food that looks like art.  Sometimes you just know what you like, even if you can't explain why.  This thing is pleasing to my palette (visual or tasty kind) so if asked I'll probably say I liked it, but to varying degrees.  If forced to choose between love or hate then a lot of things are going to get pitched over the side because I don't exactly want to say that I love it.  I never thought I'd say this, but sometimes I wish the world would appreciate ambivalence about most things rather than forcing us to choose between being with them or against them.  If asked about a complex issue one normally can't just say "I disagree" without at least explaining why.  And in doing so we tend to find out that while we may fundamentally disagree with someone or something, there may be a lot of area that we do agree with.  It could be that our brains haven't really caught up to the fact that there is more than two classifications for anything in the world.  Then again maybe it all comes down to if you like Neil Diamond or not.

On the Inside

They say that the eyes are the window to the soul and maybe they're right about that. It often feels like the one true place where we can see a person's real intentions or feelings. This includes our own. We reveal a lot of our own thoughts without knowing it. Our eyes also allow us to see someone seeing the world around them. We have five senses (six if you believe in that sort of thing) that we use to perceive the world. It's up to each of us to interpret what our senses are telling us. This brings up the question: Is our whole world only what we experience?

Everything that happens only happens to us. That is to say that no matter what you see, hear, or even think about is based on you and no one else. Sure other people may influence what you perceive, but ultimately it's up to each of us to experience the world on our own. The other day I was standing outside and looked up to see a jet stream overhead. Based on the size and speed, it had to be a fairly large plane moving pretty fast. Another few seconds and I might not have ever seen it. That's not to say that those people on board wouldn't have been flying just because I wasn't around to witness it, but in my world it could have been the case. The whole topic may come off as seeming somewhat self-absorbed, however, when you think about it our world will always be limited or expanded by our interaction with it. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it of course it still makes a sound, but if you're not there to hear it then technically it didn't happen for you. That is based on the assumption that our world is what we perceive. With that there is potential for us to alter the inherent size of the world around us.

When I was twelve or thirteen I spent the summer on my grandparents' farm. Nothing particularly special happened that summer, but I had fun. After the summer was through, I came back home. One day not long after I arrived I was in the bathroom when I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. Something about that moment changed everything. I was suddenly aware that behind my eyes was the real me. Before that moment I had just taken for granted that I was here. I stared at myself for a long time, trying to comprehend that I was more than the sum of my parts. I was something more that was hidden away within my own body. It was a lot like when a child looks at a word and realizes that they understand what is written without having to ask for help. It was that same dawning of understanding that was staring back at me. I was too young to realize the full implications of that moment. I just knew that things felt different for the first time.

I'm guessing lots of people have that moment, where they're suddenly aware of themselves as something more than just a concept. That may only be the first step though as we're only scratching the surface of how not only our own minds work, but how we perceive information. What is the basis of our world? Is it what's around us or is it all in our mind? When a person is brain dead are they detached from the world permanently? Their body my still live on, but without their mind the world is dead to them and they to it. There have been stories of people who have been in comas or nearly brain dead returning. I've always wondered where their conscious mind went during that time. Maybe it was trapped in a sort of prison of the mind in a way that we can't detect it with modern science. If the world is what the mind creates and the mind isn't working properly then what does that do to the world? While those people are in that state are they technically dead even though we've managed to keep their bodies alive? Something may eventually happen where they wake up and return to their body, but we still don't fully understand how it happens. I think a lot of that has to do with we don't know where they are while everything is dark.

In the end we could be nothing more than a few million electrical impulses passing along organic wires within our brain. Those impulses have been configured in such a way that we're able to perceive sensations from around us. We could be nothing more than a bio-mechanical computer that's really good at processing data. After a few thousand years, like most programs, we've developed our own quirks. Maybe we've become the ghost in our own machine.

On Ancient Evil

I really enjoy the concept of the supernatural. The idea that there are things out there that are just beyond our comprehension is somewhat appealing to me. In a way it gives me a bit of comfort to know that there is more to life than just what we're presented. Maybe those in charge don't have all the answers. Maybe science, which is quickly becoming the new religion, can't explain everything out there. There is mystery left in the universe and maybe there always will be. There is a flip side to that comfort though. In the vast ocean of space and time there must be things out there in the darkness that we would consider to be evil. In thirteen billion years there must have been things that have come before us. Things that we couldn't comprehend. The motivations of these things would seem evil to us. However, if you think about it, our actions would seem evil to an ant when we destroy their homes and lives for our own benefit or just because we can.

Before we get into that there is question regarding people. There are really two schools of thought on the nature of humanity. The first is that people are basically good, who want to do good, but occasionally do bad things. The other is that people are essentially bad, who do whatever benefits them most or what they feel they can get away with without consequence, but occasionally do good things. Maybe it's possible that everyone is one or the other, but there is most likely an overlap between the two. There is an ever-present argument about nature vs nurture. Some believe that people are simply products of their environments. Others feels that most behavior is innate and that we're born with certain predilections for evil. Of course with anything there are exceptions that prove the rule and exceptions to every exception. Not everyone who experiences sexual abuse perpetuates the cycle of violence so it's not always easy to identify where the root of evil comes from. I do believe that give a person enough horrific experiences they're going to adapt to those situations to a point where that's all they know. Their response to those experiences can be equally horrifying, but for that person it's all they can think to do in order to survive. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Then maybe evil is also.

The idea of evil can be somewhat subjective even though people often have a pretty black and white notion of how things are supposed to be classified. Killing a baby; probably evil. Torturing a puppy; most likely done with evil intent. Genocide; unquestionably evil? Taken out of context just about anything can be misconstrued. The people performing genocide may not think what they're doing is evil. In their mind they may believe they're purifying the world. Several religious groups have attempted it and at the time they were doing what they thought was right, even if their methods were brutal. The Serbians and Albanians have been in a centuries old conflict with each other. I'm guessing both sides see the other as the evil one. Both sides have done horrific things to each other, some as revenge for past aggressions. If given the opportunity to permanently remove the other side, it's very likely they would take it, regardless of the cost. In that situation is any one side in the right or is the whole thing just blanketed in evil? If someone killed a family member of yours would it be considered evil to burn down their house in retaliation? What if you found out that your family member had stolen from them in the first place? There is a saying that violence begets violence and in that evil must predicate more evil.

If you're like me, then you like to eat meat. I eat meat because it's delicious and more or less good for you. We were given canine teeth for a reason and it wasn't for just tearing into a piece of broccoli. When I eat a steak I don't feel that I'm doing anything wrong. For me it's a necessary part of my diet so that I can survive. Could I get mostly the same nutrients from somewhere else? Maybe, but I don't want to. A strict Hindu may see my actions as evil because I'm consuming a sacred animal for my own benefit. Even a vegan could look at my diet and say that I'm evil for putting my life above another living creature when we both deserve to live on this planet without harm. Now while I don't agree with either assessment of my choice of food, I do understand how it could appear to someone else. It goes back to the point that evil may be tied directly to perception and might not be an absolute. Is evil simply a concept used to classify actions based on how we specifically feel about them?

Going back to the beginning though, one has to wonder about the things that are out in the world, things that we don't fully understand, which could be seen as being evil. Many religions have some figurative concept of evil such as the Devil, which could be just a representation of human sin or opposition to God. In many cases there is this idea that there is malevolent being working to spread evil for the sake of evil. Maybe both theories are partially correct. As I mentioned, evil may only be question of perception of the act. If you were brought into a world that only knew evil then would it be possible for you to see something that is good as being the opposite of your sense of right and wrong?

There are plenty of entertaining stories out there about people fighting evil. It's pretty common in movies, television shows, and books for characters to face off against some great evil. The demon hunters have been fighting monsters for four seasons, eventually the battle has been ratcheted up to a point where fighting a rogue yeti just isn't going to hold the audience's attention any longer. So they're put up against something larger, such as Lucifer himself. Of course the stars of the show are going to somehow win. It doesn't matter that Satan has been around since before creation, these two plucky anti-heroes will manage to beat him back to hell. Since it's a piece of fiction we accept it, depending on how well it's written. If you think about it though it borders on the unbelievable though. Something that was ancient before the Earth was even formed would have millenniums of experience that we couldn't even grasp. How is someone with roughly twenty five years of life going to sort out how to outfox something like that?

If there are things like that in the world then they've probably been here long before we arrived and will be here well after we've shut off the lights. There is some good news though. If evil exists then good also exists out there. Both could just be ideas we use to describe its impact on the world around it. Or they could exist as something more and something we will always wonder about. That can't be a bad thing.

On Ghosts

When I was growing up I had the typical fascination with all things supernatural. The world was new to me and there was so much that was unexplained. Because of this I was willing to read about all kinds of various possible answers to the seemingly unexplainable events that happen in our weird little world. I had this Time-Life book on Ghosts, which described all sorts of ghost stories and their origins. It was presented in such a way that my child brain believed it to be factual. This was a Time-Life book after all. Looking back on those kinds of books it helps me realize how those stories lasted so long before the modern age. Today if you want to find out about something you type it into your search bar and in most cases there will be a Wikipedia entry on the subject. Also in most cases people treat this as the authority on the subject because at the bottom of the page is a nice list of references. Not to get into the validity of Wiki pages, but really it's much harder for myths and legends to perpetuate themselves when you have the internet and television shows dedicated to "finding the truth". Then again it's really hard to know that what you're seeing is based on reality. My dad used to say "Believe none of what you hear and half of what you see." Now you pretty much have to question more than half of what you see because it's becoming easier to fake reality. Back when these stories were being told there wasn't any way to counter or verify their validity.

I've talked about death before and how if ghosts do exist, given the number of people who have lived and died on this planet, then this place must be swarming with ghosts. Unless there is some kind of requirement to become a ghost. Maybe ghosts are those who didn't pass the entrance exam to the afterlife. The real question though is: Why are they here? Granted most of the universe is so complex that to our eyes it's an endless stream of chaos. Some believe there is purpose to things and in that regard everything happens for a reason. I'm not sure who's right, if either of those ideas are close to what's really going on. Regardless, one would have to figure that if ghosts exist then there has to be a reason for it.

I guess you could go back to where those ghost stories originated. Were these stories based on real events or just manifestations due to our lack of understanding of the world around us? As I mentioned with conspiracies, people are natural storytellers and may exaggerate what they believe they saw because at the time it seems real to them. In some cases the story overshadows reality and takes on a life of its own. Is it possible that some sailor saw something off the starboard side that he couldn't explain? Yes, it's very likely considering the ocean is essentially an alien world with species living under the water that we don't even know about. So some strange fish in a storm suddenly becomes a mermaid. Today we like to explain things away with science because it's very comfortable to have a rational explanation to something that was probably very scary to people a hundred years ago. Even a supernatural phenomenon like the doppelganger has recently been explained, at least possibly explained. Using electromagnetic stimulation to a specific part of the brain, the test subject felt the presence of something that appeared to be a man. Granted the scientists who were running experiment didn't understand how or why this feeling of another presence was happening, they only knew that it was happening. So it's possible that those people who saw what they considered to be their double were experiencing increased electromagnetic activity within their brain.

Then again, it's possible that the experiment tapped into a larger issue. As you may know I'm a believer in the possibility that there are additional realities besides just the one we can perceive. What if applying electromagnetic stimulation to our brain opened up our ability to see that other part of reality that's normally closed off to us. Along those lines it could be that ghosts are whispers from the next reality over. What we call demons or spirits might just be "aliens" from another dimension. There was a fairly horrible movie called Event Horizon, which if you haven't seen it (count yourself lucky), is about a spaceship with an experimental engine that disappeared and has suddenly returned. It is revealed that when the engine turned on it opened up a gateway into space-time and jumped into another dimension that was chaos. In the movie this dimension was essentially our idea of hell. The movie was a mess of ideas, but I liked the one that hell is just on the other side of our reality and it's so alien to us that to even see it would drive a person mad.

We are all just energy and when we die that energy has to go somewhere. There are a lot of ideas on if there is a thing as a soul, but let's say for a moment that our soul is the consolidation of our energy. Upon death that energy has to transfer itself somewhere. Some believe that the soul simply moves to another Earthly body in the form of reincarnation. Another idea is that based on balance of positive and negative aspects of your life you are drawn to specific afterlife locations in the form of heaven or hell. The idea of a ghost is that the energy didn't make a complete journey to its final destination and is instead stuck in a sort of limbo. In that sense the ghost is just residual energy left with no place to go. Since we're not currently built to see the energies that surround us, for the most part we don't even know that there is anything else out there. That is until that energy gathers enough strength to impact our physical world.

There have been lots of theories on ghosts and supposedly unfinished business. Think about all the things you've ever done in your life. How much of your life was unfinished in some way? Maybe you're the kind of person that completes everything you start, but if you're like most people then a large part of your life is made up of false starts and unfinished business. Very rarely does life give us any kind of closure. It's unfortunate too because in a lot of cases we as people need closure in order to move on. You know what happens though when you don't have closure? Nothing. Even without closure you eventually move on. That is if you're a capable adult. Otherwise you let it haunt you to the point that it's crippling. So the idea that ghosts are people who died before they finished what they were "supposed" to complete would mean that nearly all of us are going to making a return trip here after we die. I say that because I don't know a single person who doesn't have some kind of regret. The amount of regret that causes a person to stick around as some kind of half-entity must be almost unimaginable.

It's a scary idea to think that ghosts could exist because we just have no idea exactly what they are or the circumstances that are needed to become one. Even more disconcerting is that just beyond our field of vision there is a whole array of supernatural entities floating right in front of us. It reminds me of the saying "I'm not afraid of the dark. I'm afraid of what's in the dark." We're living the dark, but we don't know it.

On Subroutine

Everyone has heard of the five stages of grief. It's normally associated with death, but it's really more to do with loss, death just happens to be one of the biggest losses we can experience. The thing about these stages is that they always happen in the same order. How long it takes to get through a stage my vary from person to person, but you will go through it before you can get to the next one. The only way to overcome the feeling of grief is to move through all five stages. An interesting thing about it is that in most cases you're almost powerless to prevent the reaction. You will experience denial followed by anger, even if the transition between the two is within moments of each other. The whole thing brings up a question about pre-configured behavior built into us. If the reaction to loss is a predictable pattern of behavior then could there be others that we don't know about? I've talked about control before. What if we're running through a series of predetermined subroutines?

When I was talking about smell I mentioned the idea that there were possibly built-in reactions to specific scents. Our reaction to them isn't based on personal preference, but rather something physiological at work. If we have a standard response to loss then logic would dictate that there would have to be standard responses to the opposite end of the spectrum. Granted not everyone reacts the exact same way in a given situation, however, maybe there is a mental road map that all people will have to follow in order to get to their destination.

Speaking of which, grief from loss seems to be something that's fairly well mapped out. We know how we will react, even if we'd rather not. It's just a matter of fact that it's going to happen so if you were being rational you could predict what was coming next. Or at least have a good idea of what to expect around the next corner. The thing is while we're in the middle of it one of the last things that we are is rational. It normally takes someone else outside the situation to recognize what's happening. We're typically riding the wave of emotion so our ability to predict anything has probably been compromised. In fact we tend to be fairly bad at predicting how we will react to a situation. Something like the death of a loved one may seem like something we will never get over, but more often than not we do recover. On the flip side we seem to convince ourselves that certain things will make us happy for longer periods than possible. I read an interesting article about the futility of happiness, which essentially says that your brain overestimates the duration of happiness from good things and underestimates its own ability to recover from bad things. Even in that regard though there is a certain amount of predictability in our inability to predict how we're going to react. If that makes any kind of sense.

Some people may not like the whole idea that things are somewhat predestined because that means our sense of control is a lot more limited than we'd probably want. One may try to fight against this behavior in some futile effort to show the universe that they aren't dictated by emotion. I would imagine sometimes they may feel like they're successful, but are they just prolonging the inevitable? It's almost like a child fighting against bed time. The outcome is going to be the same regardless of how much they fight it, still they can't go quietly. Some people never lose that mentality. It doesn't matter if the outcome is a forgone conclusion, they will fight against it until the very end. I'm sure some would see that as noble or respect their principles and maybe in certain situations they are. However, when it comes to our own nature, who or what are they fighting against?

If you've spent a significant amount of time with another person you may find yourself able to predict how they're going to behave in various situations. In some cases you may even have an idea of what they're going to say next. Basically you've been near them long enough to just know what comes next. As it was mentioned in the movie Groundhog Day, maybe God doesn't know everything, instead he's just been around so long that he can predict what's going to happen based on a few billion years of experience. It could be that some of that is because they are running along a predetermined track of behavior. Of course humans by their very nature are chaotic so really trying to predict exactly what one is going to do is a lot like trying to predict the weather. The slightest variation could have drastically different results. Still we understand how weather works and what should happen based on certain variables and the same is probably true with a person. How they get to the emotional destination may be a mystery, but the destination can be plotted. If that's true then why isn't there a manual on what we're going to do next?

On Smell

Of our five sense it's really smell that's makes or break things and yet it seems to be mostly underrated compared to something like sight. Scientists have shown that smell is closely associated with memory thanks to the olfactory bulb being being part of the limbic system. All it takes for some people is a whiff of some familiar smell to recall a specific memory in a way that can be more powerful than looking at a photograph. The whole thing makes me wonder if it's possible that certain smells have built in specific meanings to us.

Apparently it's been determined that the smell of death is universal. All species instinctively recognize that smell. This came from researchers discovering that cockroaches tended to avoid places that had other dead cockroaches because of the smell of death. So for them it was a kind of warning that the place might not be safe. Death smells like danger. It's kind of the same reason shit smells bad to us, because it's full of bacteria that is potentially harmful to us. So the smell is a sort of warning for us to avoid it. Same thing with the smell of death and putrefaction. For us it's a warning that there is danger because when the human body breaks down it becomes poison. Now in nature the smell of death may mean different things. To a lion or a vulture it means there is potentially food near by. For a zebra though it could serve as a warning that in that direction is danger.

The smell of death is a big one, but could it be possible there are other smells that are hardwired into our brains? If so, what purpose do they serve? I've known mothers who could pick their children out of dark room just by smell. I'm guessing that's something to do with a bond between mother and child that goes beyond just a physical thing, even though the child was technically a part of the mother at one point. I've heard that it extends to adopted children as well, meaning that it's not strictly limited to biological children. Something in our brain adjusts itself to recognize offspring, regardless of biology.

Ever notice that you could doing something and suddenly smell food and your stomach starts to rumble? Up until that point you weren't even aware that you were hungry. The moment that smell hits your nose you're body prepares itself for food, even if you're not actually going to eat because the smell is coming from the next cube over. It may seem obvious that the smell of cooked food makes us hungry, but why? Our brain recognizes the smell as something that seems appetizing. Is that based on past experience or is that regardless of our culinary history? Do vegetarians ever smell something cooking and their body reacts with hunger until they realize that it's stir fry cooked with chicken instead of tofu? Everyone has seen some situation where a person in a movie eats something, comments on how good it tastes, only to discovery that it's something normally thought of as unappetizing. Rocky Mountain Oysters for example. At that point our brain and our body are in conflict with each other because the smell makes us think of food, but thanks to our upbringing we may not think bull testicles are supposed to be eaten.

It also makes me wonder if it's possible to alter our perception of what a smell signifies. For instance what would happen if someone was being tortured while the room was filled with the smell of fresh baked cookies. Would that smell forever be associated with pain? Essentially what was wired to be a pleasant smell for most people would only serve as a reminder of something terrible. What factors dictate when a smell means to us?

We tend to pass along our history in our genes. Hair color, poor eyesight, or increased risk of cancer all can be passed to the next generation. Hopefully along the way the stronger genes win out over the weaker ones, but thanks to medical advancements we're bypassing that. I've talked about evolution before. My point though if those other traits could be passed down, is it possible for our history of smell to be sent down as well? Before we used fire to cook our food, no one would have any idea that the smell of cooking meat was a good thing. Eventually someone figured that out and it became common knowledge to everyone after that point. If that was the case then the smell of something would be part of our evolution.

Technically speaking a smell is actually made up of microscopic parts of whatever it is that smells. So when you're breathing in a bad smell, you're actually taking in things you'd probably want to avoid. On the flip side when you're smelling something delicious, you're ingesting parts of it before you take the first bite. I won't even get into the various smells associated with sex because that could be a topic by itself (as sex tends to be). Although it brings up the point that if smell is made up of small parts of the larger object, then tiny pieces of us are floating around. On some occasions we run into someone that smells like home, for lack of a better term. Chemically speaking the other person smells like the perfect match for us. That could mean there is more to the whole idea of soul mates, which could be on multiple levels that we don't fully understand and can't quantify through traditional means. Once again it just shows that there are so many things going on that even when you smell something, it could be more than just good or bad, but something much deeper.

On Life vs Career

A long time ago I made a choice that rather than be someone who lives to work, I would be someone who works to live. I've always put my life before my career, or lack of it, because I figured what's the point of being someone who dreads going to work? Sure we all need money because somewhere along the way that's how our society decided to keep people in check. Go to work, earn a wage, pay for things you don't always need but have just the same. We've been told it's how you get the American Dream. Still I wonder though if it's not another variation on indentured servitude. It's true we get paid, but how many people do you know are essentially forced to work for a specific wage because otherwise they can't support themselves? I know people who make six figure salaries, but they can't afford to have an apartment on their own. They simply don't have the cash every month. Now there are extenuating circumstances, but really if you think about it, life is all about extenuating circumstances. There is this fear that if you were to stop working then you'd lose everything. I'm not saying the fear is baseless because it's usually grounded in truth. Still having just come off of nearly three years of not working, I found that maybe there is more to life than just the next paycheck.

Looking back at all the jobs I've had there is a pretty common theme. I did them either because I liked them or because they were simply a means to get something I wanted. Maybe that's true for everyone. With one notable exception my resume is filled with these fleeting positions. A few months here. Maybe half a year there. When I first graduated college I thought it was probably natural to have a resume like that. I was a teacher's aide for almost two years an after that I worked at some semiconductor manufacturer for two months, even though I knew next to nothing about semiconductors, except that they were inside computers. Then I worked as an intern at credit card company for another two months. The only reason I left the semiconductor place was because the internship was offering more money. I didn't care about either place as far as work was concerned. Both were just a way to get something on my resume so it didn't look like my only work experience was video store clerk and teacher's aide. When I graduated I was one of the last people in my class to find a job. It wasn't because I couldn't be placed. It was because I didn't want to settle for just anything. I wanted something that I could stay interested in. Turns out those places weren't hiring and I did end up settling for a company that several of my classmates had gone to. The reason I chose that place was because it paid the most and was right across the street from my new apartment. In retrospect it might not have been the best decision because eight months later I was laid off along with about three hundred other people.

There I was back in the same position, looking for work in a field I wasn't all that excited about. For four months I tried to find work, along with a few thousand other IT people who also had been laid off when the Internet bubble burst. At one point in my search I found some small company that was seriously exploiting their workers. I worked there for about two days before I stopped going in. I didn't give notice. I just stopped going in. I know a lot of people in that situation who would have stuck it out because there were no other options. Eventually I found work that was in my field and paying what I needed. Turns out by the time I found it I was already tired of the city I was living in. After about four months at this new job I was told by a friend about a position open in another state. Technically the position was a bit of a backwards step for me, however, it would get me out of town and hopefully onto better things.

The job was great. I was making more money than I had ever made before and the people were fantastic. I didn't mind the fact that I had strayed off from what I had gone to college for, I was doing something I enjoyed. Problem is that nothing lasts forever. What was once enjoyable had become monotonous. Somehow I had gone from comfortable to complacent. Without me even realizing eight years had gone by and I had very little to show for it. My title had changed and I had gotten several raises over the years, but I could work there another eight years with little or no change. The whole reason I chose that place was because it was agreeable and a little bit easy. Rather than think about my career, I focused more on my life and because of that my career came to a screeching halt.

Partly because of my job and partly because I wasn't near certain people, I decided it had to be time to make a change. I figured by going back to school I had a great reason to leave my job and be near the people I cared about. It was my attempt at using my career to better my life. Unfortunately for me things didn't quite work out the way I had hoped. Like anyone who has moved because of someone else, I found that my choices were directly tied to someone else's choices, even if that person didn't ask for the responsibility. Combined with the fact that even though it was ten years later, I was looking for a job in another recession. As I mentioned I spent most of the last three years not working. Some of that was due to being a full time student. Still it was the longest I had ever gone without working since I was sixteen. Now that I'm working again I find my career back where it was ten years ago and I have to question if it was worth it or not. Should I have focused on my career a little more?

Part of the problem for me has always been I've never known what I want to do as far as a career is concerned. It was always this vague idea of doing something interesting and meaningful. Trying doing a job search for that and see what results you get back. All the way through high school I had no idea what I was going to do when I graduated. I knew that I would be going to college, but for what I had no idea. I had liked computers for as long as I had been using them and because I knew enough about them to be somewhat dangerous, I decided to pursue them into an actual career. It just happened to be what I was interested in at the time. Or at least the most interested in. I've never been one of those people who inherently know what they want to do with their lives. Sometimes it feels like all these other people were given this secret manual on life, but my copy was lost in the mail. So I've been left to grasp blindly for a career like someone searching for their glasses. You know it's close, but you just can't see it.

Sometimes you don't have a choice in the job you do. I've found out several times in my life you often have to do whatever is necessary to support yourself. It's what a responsible adult is expected to do. And I've been fairly fortunate that I haven't had to degrade myself in ways that some people are forced to. Still I wonder how many people out there just assume that being miserable at your job is to be expected. To me that seems like such a sad way to go through life. Americans are experiencing a higher rate of stress and obesity than ever before. I have to believe that a lot of that is tied to our jobs. If you're being mentally crushed at work then eventually your body will suffer. Even knowing that people continue on because we feel like we have no choice and maybe we don't. I just think about what Bernstein said "Well, it's no trick to make a lot of money... if what you want to do is make a lot of money."

So here I am, back where I started. The only thing that's changed is that I've gotten older. It feels a little bit like the Pink Floyd saying "Ten years have got behind you. No one told you when to run. You missed the starting gun." I had a good start in the rat race, but it turns out I didn't know what the destination was and have been going the wrong direction this whole time. Like most people, I'm wishing I had a do-over.

On Death

I'm starting to wonder if death isn't such a bad thing. I know we've been brought up to believe that death is something to be feared, but death is really just a part of life. If you think about it, without death there wouldn't be any life. Just about everything we eat comes from something living, even that tofu was once a plant that had to die in order to be turned into a cube of food-like substance. And that's the way things go. Something has to die so something else can live and eventually that something else dies too. When I was younger I was afraid of dying. Maybe most people are afraid of death simply because we have no idea what happens afterwards. No one who has experienced it can tell us what to expect. There have been reports of near-death experiences where someone sees a bright light or a tunnel, but even if those reports are true, I have a feeling that it's not death itself, rather the road to it.

There are a few possibilities when it comes to what happens when we die. If you're Christian or religious there is the belief that there is some kind of afterlife, be it heaven or whatever. When you die you get to experience bliss and are surrounded by all your loved ones. Maybe that's true, but a part of me wonders if that's just a story told to people so that death isn't so scary. Don't worry about dying because afterwards everything will be wonderful. There is another belief that when you die you're reincarnated as someone or something else. Scientists have shown that energy cannot be destroyed, only transferred or changed. This is like money, or at least the value of money. You hand a dollar over to someone, the money isn't lost, it just moves on to somewhere else. The value remains the same. Then again I guess someone could destroy the dollar since it is just paper, but you get the idea of what I'm saying. So if our "soul" is just another form of energy, like an electro-magnetic field, then when our bodies die that energy has to go somewhere else. Some believe that goes into a new body. A question I had heard awhile ago went like this. In 1700 there were around six hundred million people on the planet. Three hundred years later there were ten times that many. If a soul is constantly being transfered after death, where did all those other souls come from? Speaking strictly from an energy stand-point that is huge leap in growth. It's hard to say what the original source is for all that new energy.

The other possibility for what happens is nothing. It could be when we die we simply cease to exist. Our body dies and it's like someone turns out the lights on our consciousness. The idea of not existing is what scared me the most for a long time. Life is all we know, or at least all we can remember if there was something before this. It's what we're comfortable with. Again, no one can tell us what happens afterwards so there is a tendency to be afraid of the unknown. I don't want to cease to exist, but I suppose when it happens I won't be around to care one way or another.

One could argue that there are ghosts or spirits, which contribute to the notion that there has to be something beyond this world. Maybe those things are indications of something else. We understand so little about our own world that I have a feeling we understand even less about the worlds and realities around us. If ghosts do exist then given the number of people who have died and even more to the point, people who have died badly, must number in the hundreds of millions. All six hundred million people from 1700 are dead and at least some of them had experiences that got them stuck here. A ghost could be nothing more than the echo of life. So the ghost of your grandmother might not actually be her, but rather an emotional resonance of who she was. They say ghosts, at least the bad ones, are stuck in some kind of loop, repeating the horrible event that lead to them dying. Because of this they're trapped between worlds. I tend to think of them more like psychic scars. Given time it could heal on its own.

Getting back to my original thought, maybe death isn't so bad. Some believe paradise is waiting for them. Others think we might get another go at things until we get them right. Or there would be nothing, which given how some people live, could be a huge relief. We are sad when someone dies because we no longer get to see them. Everything we knew about them came to an end, sometimes abruptly. People say that someone who died is in a better place. I don't know if they're really in a better place, but more a different place. Maybe this whole thing called life is just a giant preamble to something more and all our fear about death is like ancient man being afraid of the thunder because they didn't understand it. Then again, maybe this is all we get and we need to make the best of it because when the show is over there is no encore.

On Friends

Have you ever stopped to think why you're friends with the people you call your friends?

When we were kids it didn't take much for someone to become our friend. As children we're strangely accepting of new people in our lives and some of the most trivial things lead to friendship. Someone has a cool lunchbox or likes the same toys as you. That's good enough to start being pals. I remember with a couple of my friends I actually became friends with them because they were "hired" to beat me up. Instead of beating me up I talked my way out of the situation and we went to play on the slide. The three of us were friends for years. That was a memorable start to a friendship, but there are so many friendships that have started where I don't even know how I met the person. They just sort of appear in my memory as if they've always been there.

About a year ago I lost a friend who was like that. I can't remember a point when I didn't know him. I think about my childhood and he was there. We weren't best friends, but he was sort of constant for me. After high school we both went our separate ways. We would talk to each other every couple years during college, doing that thing where it felt like no time had passed between when we last saw each other. Then we'd both go back about our lives, comforted by the thought that no matter what else happened, the other would be out there. We had just started back up our rotation and were getting in contact with each other after a few years when he died suddenly. Not only was I sad because my friend was gone, but one of those constants in my life was no longer there.

As we get older it gets harder to let people into our weird little lives. Making friends isn't as easy anymore. Someone likes the same tv show as you, that's not always enough to break through our protective walls. I actually have a really hard time with the word "friend" anyway. It's been that way for a long time. It's actually a problem with labels in general, but that's probably too much for this column. When I think of someone I know and like they're usually in this strangely unclassified state in my head. That's assuming I like you. If I don't like you then you and your name are chucked over the side to make room for other things I do care about. I won't waste time disliking you, instead I'll nothing you. I'll spend as much time thinking about you as I will wondering if Purdue has a good fencing team this year.

On the other hand, if I like you there's a whole other process going on in my mind. I think it comes down to trust, which is an other huge topic. It matters on my level of trust with you. For most people I know I trust them with trivial information such as my thoughts on 80s cartoons being made into movies. You won't be getting too much of my political views or hopes and dreams. And at the same time I won't be asking about those things from you.

It takes a lot for someone to be moved into the friend category. Not a lot on the person's part, but on mine. I have to accept that the person in question isn't going to be bounding out of my life right as I got comfortable with them. I'm sure to the outside observer that probably comes off as a little unfair, but that's just how things work in my head. Once you're considered a friend it takes a lot to undo it. You're actually more stuck with me than anything else. The problem with that is if there is a falling out then it's permanent. If you're out with me then you're out forever. They say it's good to forgive and forget, but I don't have the patience for that. I'll just move on without you.

Anyway back to the original question, why are you friends with the people you call your friends? Is it because you knew them as a kid? Maybe it's because you went to college together. Have kids in the same school. Helped them hide a body after a wild night in Vegas. There are all kinds of reasons we pick people to be our friends initially, but what keeps them around after they've wandered into our orbit? It seems to me that people get there based on what they like, not so much what they are like. It's only after they've arrived that it reverses itself.

Are the people we meet as adults the same kind of friends as the people we met when we were young? Probably not. And it's not really fair to compare the two. I was a different person when I was a kid and my friends from then who are still around are the ones who managed to run the gauntlet that is me. They've had a lifetime to know me. The people I meet today only know the person I am now and the history gets filled as we go. I suppose both come down to just accepting someone into your life and hoping they like you. Weird how things don't really change all that much from when we were kids. We've just had more practice.

On 2009

For the record, 2009 can suck it. While I don't think this past year could be listed as the worst year, it's certainly not ever going to be listed in the same zip code as some of the best. I've lost friends and family this year. People I know have also had their share of loss and setbacks. When I think about it this past year has been more about things happening around me rather than things happening to me. Considering 2009 felt like it was full of death and sadness, maybe it's not exactly a bad thing. Still, there was an undeniable sense of being idle for way too long. It wasn't until very near the end that things actually started to pick up a little bit for me. I feel like I'm standing in the eye of the tornado. For me it's very calm, but around me there is a whirling mass of destruction.

Ten years ago I was leaving this place and heading off to start a new adventure in a brand new state. I was young and eager to try something different. College had only finished the year before and it was time to leave for a new world beyond what I had known while I was in school. I often wonder what my life would have been like had I not taken that leap. A huge portion of my life would be drastically different. I don't regret doing it, but it's natural to think about the road not taken. That was then and this is now and to be honest it's really hard to tell the difference between my then self and now self. Back then I felt as though I was starting over and here I am feeling that same way. I've circled back around to where it feels like I'm starting over again. Maybe it's a good thing for me, but it's also more than a little frustrating because I have a tendency to pre-worry (a term coined by a friend of mine) about things long before I need to. So in addition to feeling like I'm living through the Pink Floyd lyrics "Ten years have got behind you. No one told you when to run. You missed the starting gun", I'm worried that if I'm not careful I'll be right back here in another ten years.

Now all of 2009 wasn't bad. There were actually a lot of good things. Several family members have started new aspects of their lives, be it retiring from a job after years of service or leaving the military to try and sort out what it's like to be a civilian again. And my best friend lost her job after more than a dozen years at the same company only to find an even better job a few months later. Some relationships ended while others started and some even made the leap to that next step. I took the safe route of staying single, although I'm starting to wonder how much of that is by choice and how much is just a bad habit of not trying.

As usual there seemed to be a lot of celebrity deaths. Several of which were surprising at the time. Others may have not been shocking, but were still sad. This year we lost a dirty dancing roadhouse bouncer, one of Charlie's Angels, a prisoner, a man who told us the rest of the story, the king of pop, Khan himself, and the one who said that's the way it is. And to add to all that we lost another Karl with a K when we live in a world where it seems like there are simply too few. It seems like a lot and it probably is, but it's probably not all that different from years before as far as numbers are concerned.

The thing that's strange to me is that we're about to enter 2010, the year we make contact, and yet it feels like we're still arguing over the same old issues for the sake of arguing. Social and scientific issues are still being debated to the point that nothing gets done and the conspiracy theorist in me wonders if that's not exactly how someone wants it. In some ways I wonder if we're not going backwards in some aspects. People are fighting battles that were "won" more than 30 years ago. And some people are fighting battles that should have ended 30 years ago. Having had my fair share of arguments and all out fights about things, I've learned that sometimes it's no good to win the battle if you lose the war. It seems it many cases there are those who would simply rather fight because they see any kind of compromise as a lose-lose situation. Or at the very least they had to give up something. There was a social experiment where a person is given $100 and are told to share a portion of the money with a second person. They can offer any amount, but if the other person refuses they both get nothing. Depending on your logic you may say that the most likely acceptance would be a 50-50 split of the money. Others might think that the second person should be happy with any portion of money because no matter what percentage they get it will still be 100% more than they had. More often than not the people making the laws are willing to walk away with nothing if they can't keep all $100. There's a reason why the acronym for mutually assured destruction is MAD.

Overall 2009 felt like a year that you just had to survive. Anything beyond that was just a bonus. I'd like to be hopeful for 2010, even if it's only because the year itself sounds much better than any of the 00s, which no one found a good name for in ten years. Do I think things will be drastically different than the last year? Maybe not, but I'm still looking forward to what it has to offer.

On The Apocalypse

Well I suppose it has to happen at some point. The end of the world as we know it. No not the end of the world because in most cases Earth will continue to be here long after we're gone. It bothers me when people say the end of the world because short of our planet being totally vaporized into space dust, it's going to keep spinning around the Sun whether it can support life or not. There is the the chance in about 12 billion years that humans are still on the planet when the Sun finally runs out of hydrogen to fuse and then goes through helium fusion and becomes a Red Giant, where it expands out to the orbit of Mars. Even then it would take awhile before Earth felt some lasting effects. Long story short it would take so many billions of years for that to happen that man as we know it will have become something quite different than what we are now.

Anyway pick your ending. Zombie invasion, hit by an asteroid (or meteor), global climate meltdown, or good old fashion nuclear winter. According to most science fiction there are really two ways things can go in the future. Either there will be an apocalypse and the world will be turned into burnt out shell where people fight to survive and it's questioned if mankind will burn out as well. The other option is that civilization turns into some kind of utopia. The caveat with option two is that often times you have to go through option one to get to the society of bliss.

In most of the disaster movies there are only about twenty minutes worth of signs that something is wrong. And the only ones to notice it are the quirky scientist guys that are amazingly smart, but somehow aren't reputable enough for anyone to take their work seriously until the core of the Earth has stopped spinning or The White House is covered in an ice storm that won't end for two years. The more likely scenario is that the events that are leading to the end of the world (as we know it) have already been set in motion. It's not going to be everything fine one day and the next we're in a panic because the sky is raining fire. Even when the dead rise from their graves there's always going to be a couple days of reports that corpses are running amok. So try to watch the news at least once a week to get a heads up on those sort of things.

The part that interests me is how people will react in the face of such an event. Some will be in denial that anything could be happening. The scope of the event will be just too large for their brains to handle. And it's hard to blame them because of the constant barrage of things we're told we should be afraid of. While I don't believe H1N1 is going to be a pandemic that will wipe out humanity, I do wonder if people think H3N3 could be. Beware of Captain Trips. Then you have the other group of people. These are the ones who see what's happening and just deal with it. Maybe they stock up on canned food and shotguns (which is probably a good idea anyway). Maybe they're just quick enough to avoid the initial wave of undead and get setup on a nice fortified island of safety. These people will do whatever is necessary to survive.

The really depressing part about surviving the apocalypse is that's all you're doing. You're just surviving. In most of the stories about the end of the world the people in it are just trying to make it to tomorrow. There aren't a lot of spare moments spent on hopes and dreams. Maybe that's how things were a few thousand years ago. Less time was spent on worrying about your feelings or if your company will sell another dozen widgets and more time was spent on finding a clean water source or where your next meal will come from. I'm not saying that things were better back then, but it was a much simpler definition of wants versus needs.

Maybe all the survivors are doing is surviving because they know how far things have been set backwards. If you think about it, this is the most advanced our society has ever been, to our knowledge anyway. That means we have so much farther to fall should some catastrophic event happen. If something were to kill all electronic devices in 1879 the biggest hit would be the first commercial power station in San Francisco. At least as far as regular people could tell. For the most part it wouldn't be a lasting setback to the future of man. You kill power today and the effects are instantaneous. Our reliance on electronics makes us even more susceptible to drastic reversals in progress as a society. Imagine what life would be like if an EMP hit most of America. Even if we were capable of replacing the electronics that were destroyed, the time that we're down could lead to chaos. If it happened in the summer you'd lose people in the south. If it happened in the winter you'd lose people in the north. A week without lights, or phones, or the blessed Internet and society as we know it could start to crumble around the edges. The longer we spend in the dark, the more feral we become.

And that's just an electromagnetic pulse. Imagine if at the start of the industrial revolution there was a cataclysmic event that set everything back 200 years. Would things progress the same way that they were going in the first place? I know life finds a way to survive, but how does it find its way to progress beyond just survival? What happens to a society that is forced to go backwards and start over? Do we learn from the mistakes we made? Maybe there will be those who look at technology as the root of the problem and prefer we go back to a more nomadic existence. Maybe we rebuild and in time we get back to where we are now. New York City is built on the remains of the old city. So it is possible.

There are so many things that could finish us off that if you thought about it for too long you might go a little crazy. People like to think we have the means to change the world, but really we just have the means to change things enough that we can't live on the planet anymore. So we can create our own apocalypse either with weapons of mass destruction or through the inadvertent creation of some super virus. Personally I think the Large Hadron Collider has some potential to warp all matter as we know it. The Earth itself could have some global problem be it climate changes or killer trees. And if that's not enough you have other outside forces (think meteor, not aliens). I guess it just comes down to enjoying what you have while you have it because we could be already on our way to the end of things and just not know it yet.

On Modern Fears

It's really hard for me to stay current with modern fears because I seem to have this backlog of scary things that I just haven't gotten around to. I can't really worry about swine flu right now when I haven't finished being scared about Anthrax, SARS, bird flu, and global warming. Those are in addition to my ever present fears about cancer, getting old or sick in America, the general failing of our education system, and my penis falling off. So for now swine flu, or whatever they're trying to call it, is just going to have to wait until I can sort through the others. They were thrown in my face first.

Originally when it first broke to all the various media outlets the number of cases was in the triple digits. Be afraid because it's spreading so fast! Then about three days later it was corrected when the CDC said it was more likely less than twenty. Twenty people are sick out of 6.5 billion and I'm supposed to be afraid of this why? I'm not saying I disbelieve the seriousness of swine flu, but it's a cold. Sure it's not fun to get sick and there's a chance you could die from it, but is the chance really any greater? Since April there have been 4013 deaths from swine flu, which may seem like a lot. When you compare it to the number of people who had verified cases of the virus it's a small fraction. Annually there are 440,000 smoking related deaths and about 1.2 million people die in car crashes. The number of people who have died from swine flu so far comes out to less than 1% of the people who will die from smoking. In comparison to auto accidents it's so small it's not really even a number anymore. The CDC has even said that while the virus was serious, cases worldwide are typically mild. Hospitalization and death has been from people with other underlying conditions.

Problem is even knowing this I can't help but feel a slight twinge of fear. The other day I was out and someone had the sniffles. I felt uncomfortable around them and every time they'd snort I'd shudder. My mind was picturing the little viruses jumping from their snot and raping my immune system. I can see why the zombie genre is so popular. It's just our fear of other people. You're still you and technically they're still people, but they're mindless and herd together into this seemingly unstoppable wave of humanity. If you're not careful, you'll become one of them. One of the infected. That's how people are starting to look at each other. Going onto Amazon.com and buying masks and gloves so they can stay "clean" for a little while longer. I got news for you people. Even if they find a vaccine for swine flu that they can get out to everyone who wants it, there will be another virus tomorrow. They haven't cured the common cold because it's constantly evolving. And we're making them stronger. We can't keep dodging the bullet on the real super virus. Eventually something will come along that we should be afraid of, but we'll all be so numb to the every day crap that we won't even see it coming.

A couple years ago there was a movie called Civic Duty. It's really just a modern take on Rear Window. A regular guy has lost his job and spends way too much time looking at his neighbor, who he is convinced is a terrorist. Much like Rear Window you're not entirely sure what's going on until the end. Is he just another person who has been caught up in the blitz of fear? Even if he's telling the truth, who's going to believe him? It was a great example of how we're afraid of our neighbors. What's going on behind those closed doors?

So what's the point of all this fear? Are we supposed to be distracted by all the things that could get us so we don't see what's going on elsewhere? Sometimes I feel like an audience member watching a magic show. You're forced to focus on something small and don't realize the real threat. That's not to say these issues aren't important, but think of it this way. You wake up in the morning, your paint's peeling, your curtains are gone, and your water is boiling, which problem do you deal with first? None of them. The building is on fire. They've got us worrying about our curtains. You want something to really be scared of. Any society is about three missed meals away from anarchy. If we ever lost our ability to provide food for everyone you'd see just how terrifying other people can be.

If you weren't afraid before, you just haven't been paying attention...to the right things