Death Note

Last Saturday night at 3am I was talking to Lachlan in his car. I don't know how, but I remember saying, "wanna know something controversial?" (he likes controversial opinions). Of course, he said yes, and so, already inwardly grinning out how quirky and different I am, I relayed something I've been thinking about for a while:

I don't care about global warming. Recently it was announced that, if we are to continue living the way we live (or perhaps, more accurately, if the top 100 companies keep operating the way they do), the world as we know it will end by 2030. Of course, that's a sensationalist headline - what the announcement actually said was that turning around the path towards the destruction of the earth will become exponentially harder by 2030 if changes are not made now. But that's not quite the point here. 2030 or not, the fact of climate change is unavoidable (unless you're Malcolm Turnbull or Donald Trump I guess), and it's a fact that I really don't care about.

My father would roll his eyes and just call me an emo and reduce it to my "we're all just going to die" nihilism, but it's slightly more nuanced than that. At least I'd like to think so. You know how vegans are always talking (rightly so) that animals are just as valuable as humans, and should be treated as such? That's true for all other states of the earth and/or universe. So what if we obliterate everything and all the natural habitats are ruined, and every living thing dies? Why does it matter? The state of the earth as it is with people and our current environment in it does not inherently have more value than any other state of the earth. Who knows what will happen - maybe the earth will be sterile forever, maybe fungi will become the predominant life-form, maybe something completely new will involve and find what we consider to be a decimated world to be beautiful, because it is all they know - just as we find the earth as it is beautiful, because it's all we know. In any case, it's hypocritical to talk about how we as humans need to consider all the other organisms on the planet and sustain the environment for them, because that itself is inherently prizing what life currently looks like over anything else, just as people criticise prizing human life over other life forms in our lack of respect for the environment in a quest to technologically advanced. Ironically, it's anthropocentric.

But that's not actually the point of this post. It's just a good example of the dissonance between my theoretical beliefs and my actions (yeah, Sa's being overly critical of herself again, sorry). I say all this shit - and I genuinely believe it too - and yet you still see me recycling. Turning off the shower when I'm applying soap. There aren't overwhelmingly active initiatives to save the environment as we know it, but they're active enough for it to discredit my belief that it doesn't actually matter. And this applies to many things.

Yeah, you guessed it, I'm talking about death. Everyone around me is going to roll their eyes, but, just for clarity: I don't think there is any inherent value to life. I don't think dying is sad or dreadful - for one, we won't be, so we won't be sad that we're dead. And, given the utter inconvenience (nightmare might be too dramatic) that life has proven to be so far, my own philosophy would dictate that I should kill myself. Right now. But I'm still writing. See?

Maybe I could cite Newton's First Law of motion: an object will remain at rest or in uniform motion in a straight line unless acted upon by an external force. But there have been plenty of opposite external forces (to life) acted upon me - mental illness, stress, and just the pure bother of having to live - that would suggest my life should have come to rest by now. So why am I alive?

The classic Camus-ian retort is that, while life doesn't have any inherent meaning, this leaves us free to create meaning in a way that makes life worth living, force-wise. And, to an extent, I agree. I must - for I find myself engaged in topics of social justice, art, and science. Let's focus on social justice. If someone were to ask me, I'd say, of course I think that oppression should be alleviated in all forms and that we should be actively working towards it. And I make the effort to help work towards these ends.

(As a good example, and while I'm here, you should donate to this cause to fund access to psychological support for black women and girls: https://au.gofundme.com/rachelcargle).

So I'm involved, albeit not to my maximum ability. I place value on certain principles. But one of the principles I place value upon, starkly in contrast to those of equality, cleaning up the earth, all those feel-good things - is nihilism. Which ruins everything else. None of that really matters - there is no inherent value in equality over any other state, given the overall meaninglessness of the universe (this post probably really doesn't apply to you if you're religious - sorry.).

I have to choose. Either I commit fully to nihilism, or to an optimistic existentialism. I either kill myself, or commit wholeheartedly to improving the world in the ways we typically concede it could be improved. Until then, I live a life of hypocrisy.

If/when I die of my own hand, this will be my death note.