Posts tagged the future

So let’s just assume for a moment that Pretentious Douchebag is kinda…you know.
Kitey. Yeah. Let’s assume that. Now, let’s talk.

The future terrifies me.

I think it goes without saying that the future - the impending sense that the world will move on, with or without you, for better or for worse, objectively and without emotion - terrifies most of us. I’m reminded of a quote by Sagan, made in regards to our little planet:

 The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived here.

The concept of being meaningless, the idea that we’re all alone and that the world continues without us, is scary. But not as scary as the idea that we could all be gone anywhere between now and sixty years; that this lifetime may be our last. That, on a world that’s been spinning for billions of years, we are the ones to witness the twilight of our own species. One look at the newspaper sets off a spiral in the recesses of my chest, fuelled by oil spills, nuclear winter, fundamentalism and the promise of a final, all-encompassing world war, fought over what little resources we haven’t squandered.

But then, I’ll look up from the newspaper, on the train, at the people around me, and I’ll consider them in full-the fathers taking their daughters to baseball games, the boy showing his grandparents how to play his videogame, the ragged biker helping an elderly man with a luggage bag, the parents filming their son’s first train ride, and I think, if only for a moment, that the future’s gonna be alright. 

I think the future is a matter of perspective.