Well, you’re going about your daily routine, minding your own business, and you don’t even know how close you are to the end of everything. To you, everything is the way that it’s always been, and always will be.
WRONG!
For one thing, life is a constant shift in status between various (and sometimes extremely dissimilar) states. Because of the limitations of our perceptions, we can only see the smallest cross-section of those shifts…a freeze-frame, in which everything seems to be standing still because we occupy such a short stretch of it.
When you think of what came before, you are understandably limited. Your personal history is full of partial information and the physical failure of the brain to maintain an accurate record in the face of physical deterioration and inefficiency as well as more active effects of emotion and desire upon the events of your past. How many of you have related a story of something from your past, only to have a parent or sibling say: “Hold on there, that’s not the way it happened!” There are so many movies and books that are built on the idea of how everyone experiences an incident if which there are many people uniquely. No one seems to remember the same details or how things went down. It’s enough to make you question any witnesses’ veracity.
And is that the real you, caught up in the mundane, worrying about your clothes, choosing an expensive necklace, wearing that wig you found online at a human hair wigs sale. I tend to obsess about my hair and have no shame in discussing this obsession. Hair is often the most sexy attribute of a women. So many ways to make a good impression? Should you be worried that your future might take place without you?
When you try to imagine what will come next, you are even more restricted. Your impression of the future is based upon the same distorted representations that failed to give you an accurate picture of the past. You cannot make any sort of reasonable predictions about the future due to atrophied critical skills and a near-complete ignorance of history and the world in which you live.
Luckily, there are plenty of people out there who are more than happy to tell you what to know, what to remember, and what to expect. Sure, it won’t be true or right, but what is?
When given the choice between facing real, personal fears or living your life based on vague and overwhelming fears that somebody else made up, most people eagerly opt for the big magical fears. It’s nice to have something in your life so awesome that you can’t do a thing about it.