Cynical optimism · 3:22am Nov 29th, 2012
Woo-hoo. It appears that Motionless has gotten approved in an hour flat. Thankfully, I'd already almost finished this essay and only had to trim out the part where I insult perfectly good people to make a point.
In any case, it looks like it's time for an incredibly long post about it that's half a personal story! Don't you just love these bits of unwarranted self-importance? I certainly do.
I had my first existential crisis when I was about eight or nine.
I probably had one when I was younger, but this is the first I properly remember, after I finally learnt that yes, death is a thing that happens to humans, that has happened within the last hundred years and that my mother was a bit of a dick in the regard to tell me otherwise; this was also after I’d read How To Live Forever in the featured section of the school library.
I was crying to my father and shouting ‘please, I don’t want to die, I don’t care if they have to replace every part of me with metal and my heart with a machine and my brain with a computer, even, I just don’t want to die, please, I don’t want to die’. I believe those were my exact words.
Now, after a lot of this nonsense, and I think I was about thirteen about the time this latter realisation happened, after years of alternating between apathy and despair about my imminent death, I was struck by a far greater horror: the realisation that, given the lack of inherent meaning in life, even immortality would be ultimately pointless.
Guess how hard I metaphorically shit myself.
After years of this, really, my angst has more or less washed out.
And the thing is, I’ve—for some reason—been told how realistic my characters seem to be and how realistic their situations are, and I can’t bloody well imagine why. I haven’t ever fallen in love and haven’t ever fucked a doll and I haven't ever been a pony’s pubic hair. I suppose I can now add to the list that I've never been an immortal being floating through the cosmos.
What inspired me to really write Motionless—what kicked it off, really, because I’d always wanted to write a ‘Celestia grows old’ fic since I read that one whose name I can’t remember but ended in her wondering about whether she would float forever through the cosmos and was kind of sad and I showed it to my father—was SSNE’s story Hello, Sedna, which is actually a very nice story that you should read.
I started writing it barely minutes after I’d read it.
Now, I originally started it out as a dark, brooding story, meant to express the passing of eternities.
Here’s the thing, though: I didn’t edit it or anything. That’s how quickly and how seamlessly it transitioned into comedy; it just went. A person, alone, unable to do anything but think for an eternity—why should she spend that eternity brooding?
What’s the point in that?
Motionless came fluently, and once I got into it it came from a single simple idea: I genuinely do not believe that an immortal being, given infinite time, would spend all of it being pathetic in that way; I do not believe, personally, that a person like Celestia would treat her situation with submission, and surrender to it without a fight.
In short, I refuse to believe that Celestia would be pathetic enough to surrender entirely, to herself or to anything else.
Yes, I can refuse to believe in basic common sense.
The power of denial is beyond reproach.
29th November 2012
Yishun, Singapore
I too am horrified by death, but I am not horrified by life being objectively meaningless.
Personally, I am happy with the notion that I get to choose Meaning for myself. I think it would be terrible to have some cosmic Purpose, some outside, external, objective Meaning forced onto me. It would be a kind of existential, ontological slavery. "You were created to do 'X'. That is your Purpose."
Horrifying! I want to exist for my own reasons!
And what if a being ever actually achieved their cosmic purpose? What then? Obsolescence? Uselessness? Extinction?
No, I am fine with being charged with inventing my own Meaning, with being a Creator Of Meaning for myself. A Value Engine. A Purpose Generator.
As for eternity being a problem? Sour grapes. That's all that is. Sour grapes from Emo people who are grumpy because they are doomed to die.
The secret to what eternal life would be like can be easily found in early childhood, before the concept of death is understood. Each day is fun. Or it is some mixture of sad and fun. Or excitement or boredom or whatever. Each day is new. Each day is expected to follow after another, forever, and this is far from being a problem - it is just how life is. It isn't even an issue. One day at a time.
Then we learn about death.
Eternity is only a problem for those that do not have it.
It cannot be boring, or dull, or horrible or a burden, no matter how many angsty vampires in stories for horny teen girls say otherwise. There is always something new, always something to do, always something to see - even in a finite universe.
Because even within a finite cosmos, there exists an infinite set of possible and potential actions and relationships with regard to it.
As long as there is an infinite set of possible actions and relationships, even a finite cosmos is no threat to an eternal being. Always something new.
And if we throw in the possibility of forgetting - at all - the problem becomes utterly moot. I used to re-read my favorite books every year because I had forgotten them enough to enjoy them again anew, with the new perspectives of having changed myself over time.
I really hate stories about what a terrible burden immortality would be, and how sad and angsty an immortal entity would be.
HOGWASH. Innumeracy. A total lack of comprehension of what an infinite set really means.
Or more likely, sour grapes.
Wait, you haven't been a lesbian in love with a homophobe?!
550726
As the page loaded and I came face-to-face with the unusual magnitude of your comment, I found myself lurching forward in surprise, smacking my nose into my chocolate ice-cream as I made a sound akin to 'ho-boom', causing a nearby old man to stare at me. That's impressive.
That besides, there really isn't a truly infinite set of anything; the possible interactions between any set objects, however great, are finite, no matter how small you set the increments. Plenty are repeatable, but all in all they really are truly, completely finite; there is no such thing as infinity, because infinity is a word for a nonexistent concept.
And when you apply infinite time to anything finite, everything goes away very, very quickly.
550905
That's classified.
How to Live Forever, or, A Beginner's Guide to Immortality? I remember reading that, gave me the existentials for a few months. Didn't think anyone else had ever read it, though.
550941
I'm actually not sure what it was called; I remember it was a red cover, was a legit guide and was illustrated like a Horrible Histories book, though.
>given the lack of inherent meaning in life, even immortality would be ultimately pointless
I would do it to have more time for gathering knowledge
551123
And when you've attained all knowledge and what you haven't collected has rotted away and you cannot die?
551139
Then I'll have all the time in the world to solve this problem.
551139 Then I would be a god
551222 //dl.dropbox.com/u/31471793/FiMFiction/Spike_lolface.png
550726 I agree with literally every word Chatoyance said, despite my history of disagreeing strenuously with her. I said much the same thing in a blog post:
Floating through space for eternity probably would be boring, but the problem is that floating through space doesn't just mean floating through space. It's a metaphor for eternal life. The problem isn't eternal life, but the assumptions behind that metaphor.