The fact that people and things that I love will persist after I am gone is the only comfort around the prospect of my inevitable death. And it’s what makes it worthwhile to build a better future for people who will persist long after I am dead.
To my mind, a meaningful life cannot be found in selfishness, only in truly valuing other humans, places, or things as much or more as oneself. I’ll die. But the effect I have on the world, hopefully for the better, won’t - not for a long time, barring apocalypse.
Maybe that means you have kids, your own or others’, who learned from you, or that you made art that comforts people in the distant future, or that you slowed climate change or helped bring an endagered species back from the brink, or maybe you unknowingly inspired someone else to do that, or to do who knows what other good things, or that you preserved something for the future that might have been lost otherwise (blessed be the librarians and scribes and monks and accountants with wax or clay tablets who preserved so much history that would be entirely lost to us now otherwise).
The idea that I might just suddenly want my friends and family to die just because I’m dying is ludicrous to me. They’re my friends and family. I love them. I want them to live and be happy as long as they can. If they all die too then now the situation is just many times more tragic and depressing.
Ditto for Earth, and all the things on it that I love. The value of the things and people I love is not remotely at all dependant on my ability to be here to perceive them. I’m not that important, even though my internal perspective gives me an illusion of centrality and main character-ness.
And everyone dying wouldn’t make me any less dead, either. Literally what would be the point of that? “If I can’t have life, nobody can?” No.
Edit: there’s a quote that John Green likes to quote, but the source of which I can’t remember, that goes something like, “The world is always ending for somebody.” That’s true in a way, too, if the world is defined as what any given individual perceives it to be. If your city is bombed, or your whole family dies of covid, or you survive a genocide, or your children die in a car accident, or anything like that, maybe that might as well be an apocalypse from your perspective. I could understand someone left behind in a situation like that wishing for the opposite, even if just for a time: that if their world ends, then they would rather go out with it than remain alone, after.
But the only examples I can think of off the top of my head where people clearly wanted to go out and take their whole world down with them are murder-suicides, where someone killed their whole family or shot up a school and then shot themself. That’s clearly an unhinged and evil thing to do that has no benefits to anyone whatsoever, including the perpetrator. I’ll confess I’m having trouble coming up with any scenario where someone might want the world to die with them where it wouldn’t look like this.
What? NO.
The fact that people and things that I love will persist after I am gone is the only comfort around the prospect of my inevitable death. And it’s what makes it worthwhile to build a better future for people who will persist long after I am dead.
To my mind, a meaningful life cannot be found in selfishness, only in truly valuing other humans, places, or things as much or more as oneself. I’ll die. But the effect I have on the world, hopefully for the better, won’t - not for a long time, barring apocalypse.
Maybe that means you have kids, your own or others’, who learned from you, or that you made art that comforts people in the distant future, or that you slowed climate change or helped bring an endagered species back from the brink, or maybe you unknowingly inspired someone else to do that, or to do who knows what other good things, or that you preserved something for the future that might have been lost otherwise (blessed be the librarians and scribes and monks and accountants with wax or clay tablets who preserved so much history that would be entirely lost to us now otherwise).
The idea that I might just suddenly want my friends and family to die just because I’m dying is ludicrous to me. They’re my friends and family. I love them. I want them to live and be happy as long as they can. If they all die too then now the situation is just many times more tragic and depressing.
Ditto for Earth, and all the things on it that I love. The value of the things and people I love is not remotely at all dependant on my ability to be here to perceive them. I’m not that important, even though my internal perspective gives me an illusion of centrality and main character-ness.
And everyone dying wouldn’t make me any less dead, either. Literally what would be the point of that? “If I can’t have life, nobody can?” No.
Edit: there’s a quote that John Green likes to quote, but the source of which I can’t remember, that goes something like, “The world is always ending for somebody.” That’s true in a way, too, if the world is defined as what any given individual perceives it to be. If your city is bombed, or your whole family dies of covid, or you survive a genocide, or your children die in a car accident, or anything like that, maybe that might as well be an apocalypse from your perspective. I could understand someone left behind in a situation like that wishing for the opposite, even if just for a time: that if their world ends, then they would rather go out with it than remain alone, after.
But the only examples I can think of off the top of my head where people clearly wanted to go out and take their whole world down with them are murder-suicides, where someone killed their whole family or shot up a school and then shot themself. That’s clearly an unhinged and evil thing to do that has no benefits to anyone whatsoever, including the perpetrator. I’ll confess I’m having trouble coming up with any scenario where someone might want the world to die with them where it wouldn’t look like this.