simont | Morbid mortality musing

It seems traditional for me to have a morbid mortality moping moment every five years or so; and since my last one was around my 25th birthday, I'm now about due. I had vaguely expected to have one last month when I turned thirty.

But actually, I don't seem to feel it coming on at all. Human mortality keeps striking me as a basically reassuring thing at the moment.

Partly this is because it relieves me of the responsibility to do various things absolutely perfectly. If I were theoretically capable of living forever, then it would be greatly in my interest to keep my body in perfect shape, keep my brain properly organised, and generally never do anything to myself or my possessions whose effects I couldn't somehow repair – and also to actually get round to repairing everything I did do. Instead, the fact that it's all going to run out in a finite time anyway means that a certain rate of mental and physical entropy can be tolerated: although it's worth making some effort not to be a total wreck by the time I'm 75, I at least don't have to take the quantity of care that would be required not to be a total wreck by 175, or 1750, or 175000000. And a good job too, since I imagine that diminishing returns would set in, and the amount of maintenance effort required would rapidly become unmanageable.

Also, since I seem to gradually accumulate traumatic experiences and bad memories as I go through life, it's occasionally reassuring to think that at some point that slate gets wiped clean and someone else gets to start afresh, that the effects of any given betrayal or unintentionally hurtful action are limited in their extent. Just imagine if someone did you the kind of wrong you never really forget, and you immediately knew you were doomed to live with that in your memory for an entire unimaginable eternity. And just imagine if you knew that any such blow you inadvertently dealt someone else through (say) not paying attention would stay with them for eternity.

It's not that I want to die. Far from it. I want to carry on for a good while yet. It's just that, well, given that we all have to go anyway, I keep seeing silver linings in that.