When I was younger, things like this really disturbed me. Maybe I was a morbid kid. I remember realizing that I would one day die about the time I was 10 or 11. It made me very, very sad.
What's sad is a ten-year-old concerned about death, or being sad about some future he read about where all books are being burned, or, you know, stuff like Neal DeGrasse Tyson tweeted recently:
That shit used to keep me up at night!
Not anymore, though. The longer I live, the less I really care about the fate of the planet, the human race, its creations, time, eternity, all that. I do feel exceedingly lucky to have lived in a time when I have clean drinking water, recorded music, modern medicine, the Internet, & vegan diners. If I had been born a hundred years earlier, I would probably have already died from cholera after watching half my children die in childbirth. That doesn't sound like fun.
What changed? I think that as I lost my youthful self-absorption, which carried with it a healthy serving of self-importance, I came to find that humans are not nearly as interesting or important as we think we are. Furthermore, we just destroy everything - look at our planet!
Luckily there are some nice humans that one can spend time with. Unluckily, they never seem to be in charge of anything.
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