extirpation
extirpation
the state or condition of having become locally or regionally extinct
One night when I was a kid, I asked some pretty hard questions about what happens when you die (thanks, Lion King). Mom always tried to tell me the truth, so she gave the best answer she had: It’s just like before you were born, absolute nothingness.
This was not particularly comforting.
For a long time I thought of death as a remarkable unfairness. How dare the human experience be so wondrous, only for it all to be taken away from us at the end? It felt like a cruel cosmic joke.
As I’ve gotten older though I've shifted on that viewpoint. Our world is far too rich and complex for us to pretend we have all the answers. I look around and think about how many things had to go right for this planet to sustain life. In defiance of all odds, we haven’t seen any evidence of this miracle elsewhere in the universe. It’s a fragile balance.
I’m not a religious person, but I’ve come to realize that I am a spiritual one. I have a great reverence for the intricate systems around us and the incredible way they flow into one another. It feels too precise just to be the perfect confluence of happy accidents. There is a frequency to the universe that seems deliberate.
That’s why I’m so concerned about the tech bros working to “cure” death. I certainly understand the impulse, at one point I was willing to do anything to avoid unexistence. However I’ve learned that bad things happen when inevitability is rejected, and nothing is more inevitable than death. It should not be trifled with.
Pursuits down this path, attempting to disrupt life itself, will not save us from a curse but deliver our damnation. I do not believe hell exists, but I believe humans have enough hubris to build our own.
ContextFall
Mourning Person by Anuja Mitra