Saturday 27 July 2002

Pic of the day: The Summoner inspects his work. Screenshot from Morrowind, in which I have created a class centered on summoning. More details later, perhaps. With the future, you never know.

Why bother?

I'd really love to make someone think.

Tonight I had the choice between playing Morrowind and writing something deep and meaningful in my journal. Well, that was an easy choice. Morrowind is fun.

***

As I walked home from the shop today after buying my groceries for the weekend, I was thinking, as usual. I was thinking about how good it is to be alive when one has a life such as mine, with moderate wishes and desires. It doesn't take much to make me content, compared to most men (and presumably women) my age. Many single men with moderate income and low status are depressed. (Of course, many married men are depressed too. But single men are more likely to suffer from depression. What is cause and what is effect is left as an exercise for the reader.) Ordinary people are unhappy because they have not learned to crop down their wishes to a realistic level, the way I have.

Anyway, I was thinking about how life is good and how much it would take for me to end it. I stretched my imagination: In an entirely hypothetical situation where only one could survive of me and my best friend, would I be willing to die so that she may live? Possibly. Not only do I love her, sort of, but it would also be a rational thing to do: She is almost a generation younger, and is just starting her career as a doctor. Over her future lifetime she is likely to save hundreds of lives and increase the quality of life for many more. In contrast, I'm not likely to make a noticeable difference to the world one way or another.

But then I thought: To increase the number of living humans in this world is a trivial task; but to make even one of them think for itself is a Promethean undertaking.

***

Now back to the top: The obvious problem here is that I have no idea about the effect of my words. I'm not a professional philosopher, just a person who sees reality from the edge and tries to describe what he sees. I know a fairly steady number of people read this journal, even though some of them come and some of them go and some just pass through. But with a very few exceptions, I have no idea who you are or why you are here. I guess most of the Norwegian readers are people who know me from elsewhere, but I still don't know what they're looking for. And most of my readers and scattered around the globe.

I don't mind if I entertain you; feel free to laugh at me or with me. And if some of you are browsing just for the articles about computer games, that's OK too. (Those entries are usually coded blue, though I guess there may be some throwaway comments and screenshots elsewhere too.) If some of you just want to see what a foreigner can do to the English language, I guess that's OK too. Hey, you may even come here only for the pictures. If you're happy, I'm OK.

But you know what would really make my day? If I could make someone think a new thought, even a small one. If I could make someone doubt the obvious. Even if you think it over and conclude that the obvious answer was right after all, that's fine! It may even be the best. As long as you think first. As long as you ask the question, even if you think you know the answer. If that ever happens to one of you, I would be pathetically thankful if you dropped me a few words to tell it. That way I can die – hopefully decades from now – feeling that my life was not completely wasted.

Because if I'm going to waste my time on superficial creatures that never do anything they are not scripted to, I think I prefer to do that in Morrowind. "Real life has superior graphics, but it lacks a reliable reload function. It also runs slowly on most hardware."