The other day, CNN reported that youth from all over the world get depressed after watching James Camerons “Avatar”. In forum thread, multiple posts tell of people who feel bad after watching the film and realizing they’ll never get to live on Pandora. Good. That’s the only way you can realize what to do with your life.
CNN interviews Swede Ivar Hill after he posted on the forum:
“When I woke up this morning after watching Avatar for the first time yesterday, the world seemed – gray. It was like my whole life, everything I’ve done and worked for, lost its meaning. It just seems so … meaningless. I still don’t really see any reason to keep doing things at all. I live in a dying world.”
Heavy stuff. But still… From this realisation, he has the possibility to move on.
During a time when I read too much space opera, I felt kind of the same way.
Welsh author Alastair Reynolds always made me feel worst. With his background as an astronomer and his experience in using data that’s millions of years old, his novels have that epic quality, with giant scale and vast distances. I believe the term “vastness” was invented just for his work.
When you start grasping the galactic perspectives that Reynolds work with, your own insignificance in the scheme of things begin to dawn on you. In his world, a character that embarks on a long trip close to the speed of light must accept that thousands of years has passed in objective time. No popcultural shortcuts there.
And as civilisations rise and fall, the reader gets smaller, and smaller, and smaller.
In one of his novels, there is a mention of great intergalactic feuds that spanned over millions of years, but which were “mere skirmishes” compared to the larger galactic wars.
And in the end, you sit there and realize your life is ridiculously short and that you have no significance at all on a larger scale of things.
This is where it’s getting good.
If one human lifetime is insignificant. If it doesn’t matter what you do since our whole civilisation is born and dies within the blink of an eye on a galactic time-scale… Well, then it doesn’t matter what you do. Or don’t.
The most important gift sci-fi has given me is the understanding that I don’t have to worry so much of my choices, that what I do in my everyday life is meaningless on a grander scale and that I therefore cannot fail.
How can I fail when I cannot win?
Look at it as an anti-thesis to self-help books: The key is not to see the positive side of things but rather to see the completely pointless. Only then can you let go of the weight you’re pulling and do something useful.
There’s no point in jumping from one foot to the other trying to figure out what is right. Just do whatever is good for you. It’s not like the universe cares.
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...
