Sunday, December 5, 2010

Boredom.

I'm bored, so I thought I would check on the old, disused blog. I think it has a relative somewhere on the internet. Some other platform I once created to spout thoughts about whatever I happened to be interested in at the time. It is, however, long since forgotten. I don't remember what website it was on or through, the URL, my username, password, anything. It's just a fragment of what I thought about at one time. I doubt anything there is even really relevant to how I live or think now.

However, even those little fragments of thoughts, floating about in cyberspace, are more real than most of the thoughts we ever have. However difficult it may be to find or make sense of, they still function as proof that the person who wrote them exists. Or did at one point.

I remember reading XKCD one day and it was one of those rare occasions where it wasn't really about humor. The comic talked about what happens to a person's internet life once they die. For example, I usually leave my computer on all of the time, simultaneously logged in to a bunch of different websites. Gmail, some forums, facebook. But when someone dies, it takes a long time for their trace to disappear. Maybe on some forum, they were a great contributor, and one day they just sort of disappeared. People wondered where they went for a while. Maybe they just moved on, maybe their computer broke, maybe they moved to the heart of the amazon, to get away from it all, and didn't tell anyone. People check their profile sometimes, just to see. One, two, three months since last login. Their sessions start to time out one by one, subscriptions expire. Server resets close out their autologins. They stop getting email from everyone except a few spambots. Eventually, once all their accounts have been inactive long enough, they start getting deleted, and then one day it's like they never existed at all.

Sometimes people read the things I write about and think I'm a morbid person, thinking about death a lot. I disagree. I think I'm much happier for my ability to consider the realistic effects of death. Simply because I'm not afraid of it.

Philosophically, I feel like I fall in a weird category. I have my own "religious" leanings. Politically I'm more a Libertarian than anything else, although that came from a conservative childhood and very liberal adolescence. I have some (a lot of) objectivist leanings (thanks Ayn Rand, you ruined me for all the other neighborhood cats). Yet I try to be mindful and respectful of life in general. Oh well, se la vie.


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