Ask Lemmy

i don't really participate in social media or any of that.

That's probably the main difference. I spend like 20 minutes a day on lemmy and that's it. I used to be very active on TikTok and Reddit. Went from a depressed and anxious mess to having a job and being happy and outgoing basically by focusing on what's in front of me rather than what's on my screen. Many people stay in their defeatist echo chambers and that's the only reality they engage with. There are plenty of reasons to be worried but the thing is there always are. Life, society, family and so on have always been fragile. All you can do is enjoy what you have in this very moment.

@TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world

Perhaps I must illustrate this with a story I write as I compose this very reply.

Imagine someone is brought into this world, to a house of three.

Year after year, the small family slowly improves the house: the backyard got new toys for the kid to play with, a new bedroom is made, cradle becomes a desk for doing school homework. As the kid grows, he starts helping his parents with the reforms, both for him and for them.

Kid becomes teen, then he modifies much of his bedroom to fit his tastes. He grows more, then his former toys get carefully wrapped and stored for his intended, future children.

He becomes adult. He starts college and job. He's made himself a career and he got promoted. He buys himself a better PC (the first thing he got to buy with his own paycheck) and he repurposes a corner of his desk for tinkering with electronics and ham radio.

One day, a strong climatic disaster happens, and the house partially crumbles to the ground. The whole family dies in the disaster. They get buried at the local cemetery. What's left of the house is sold and the new owner, a construction corp, decides to further demolish to merge the land with the neighboring houses they also bought.

Land becomes a warehouse and, after a few decades, a data center for a mid-21st century tech corp, where exabytes are stored in quantum servers. The story of that very family, however, is nowhere to be found, as their gravestones, and the cemetery as a whole, have been seeing fewer and fewer mourning guests as time passes, also gets bulldozed cause more data centers are needed and cemeteries are such a "waste of space" for landlords.

Now there's not even a gravestone number plaque. Nobody knows the names of those who used to be buried, let alone their stories.

This is the legacy 99.99% of humans are going to leave: none at all. Every happiness and sadness, every pain and relief, every fight and war, every love and passion, everything will end up being buried and all the bones will eventually be treated as part of the dirt of a land to be repurposed, first by "powerful" wealthy people, then by Mother Nature as climate change begins to redeem back a land which was originally Hers, and finally by the cosmos after Sol dies and Andromeda finishes the merger.

Why is my life so pointless? Not just my life: the whole existence. I don't even need to rely on fictional stories: we don't know names and personal lives from all those serfs of 14th century medieval Europe struck by Plague. We, living on a world highly reliant on writing, ironically don't know the name or life of the very first Sumer person to ever do cuneiform in Mesopotamia.

And when one realizes how mindbogglingly fleeting this existence are, and how even our individual subjective experiences are just neurological tissue to be dissolved as cadaver fluids to be consumed by vultures which will also become cadavers themselves someday, it's hard to unsee the fleetness.