October 24th, 2022
I read an essay today about how the internet will be dead soon.
We’ll look back and laugh at the period of time that we, as a species, spent endlessly staring into the glowing void of our digital devices.
The argument for this imminent death is that the internet isn’t real.
It’s empty.
And empty things don’t last.
And you can’t fill yourself up with empty things, so it explains why we’re all not just tired, but exhausted.
Are you exhausted?
I wrote an essay a few weeks ago talking mad shit about philosophy, and I stand by that while still loving philosophy.
My latest obsession, though, isn’t philosophy but the history of philosophy. Because it tells the history of us so much better than regular history does.
It shows us what we were thinking and feeling and wanting at any point in recorded time; it isn’t stupid things like gas prices and dates of battles and insignificant numbers describing mundane details of empty things.
It’s humans saying what it was like being human then, which still says a lot about what it is to be human now.
I have a big book of philosophy that I’m going through at the moment. Every philosopher gets at least two pages in the book, and I think: wouldn’t it be nice?
I don’t want much, but I want to live a life like that.
Something not empty. Something that lasts, that you can hold without fear of it falling apart in your hands.
I hope that when I’m gone — when I’ve spent all the time I had on this planet trying to use plain words to connect to all the other people who were here, too; when I finally use up every year I get and walk back into the darkness from where I came; when I die in the singular way that I will, for sure, die — that I will somehow earn just two pages in the book of the history of humanity.
The Den 