Friday 18 March 2005

Pic of the day: Screenshot from Sims 2. A Sim created in my image.

What do I live for?

Don't get this wrong, it is not as if I want to die. Actually, quite the opposite. While my body is wrestling with some unknown disease, my desire to live keeps burning in me, an irrational hunger for life that I cannot explain. Perhaps it is simply hardwired into my brain. But when I try to justify being alive, it is not so easy. You'd think that objectively speaking, I ought to be one of the first to get the axe.

I mean, even I agree that my job is basically pointless. It is necessary, but only because certain tasks are organized in a less than optimal way. My whole workplace might be superfluous if society develops far enough. And as for myself, I am hardly an irreplaceable specialist. I may be able to do some things that most people at the workplace cannot, but those are not things we cannot absolutely do without. Actually I have on purpose taught others to do the things I normally do. I don't want to be irreplaceable.

So when I come home from work, what do I do? Play games and watch animation. There is no one here who needs me either. No one who depends on me financially or emotionally. Again, this is not a big surprise, it is a life I have been living for a long time and wanted to. The few useful things I do are simple maintenance, of body and home. And soul, occasionally, I guess.

What do I contribute? What do I give? I pay my taxes, of course, but so would anyone else that held my job. If I fell by the wayside, sooner or later someone else would do the job and pay the taxes. Perhaps it can be argued that I keep a slot filled so someone else can do something more useful. But if they can do something more useful, wouldn't they do that instead? Surely it would be better paid. Perhaps I am keeping some slummer down, who might have qualified for my job... Although to be fair, I don't really wish my job on some innocent bum.

In City of Heroes, I beat up evildoers, but of course the machine just creates more of them once I'm up, up and away. I am just satisfying my dream of justice with my fingers, much like most men sooner or later in their life satisfies their dream of physical intimacy with their fingers and their minds. It is hardly anything to be proud of, no matter how fun it may seem while it lasts. It is certainly not contributing anything to the real world.

Once upon a time, I thought that sooner or later I would write a worthwhile novel. I've started lots of them, spurred on by some great idea. But they all petered out and came to nothing. I've never completed a one, and at the time I gave up on them it was largely because I realized that they would not be good even when finished.

And besides, does the world need more entertainment? If you can read this, you have probably found it on the Internet. You can fire up your favorite search engine, type "jokes" in the search field and laugh your lungs out for hours and hours if you really feel you need it. Or if you prefer more serious, suspenseful entertainment, you can type "free e- books" or "free ebooks" in the same space, and enjoy weeks and weeks of books where the copyright has expired, or in a few cases, that are voluntarily donated to the public. If you omit the "free" part, you would have no chance to read new books as fast as they are being written. Sure, some of it is trash, actually a lot of it is. But if I can't make better than trash myself, this cannot be why I was born into this world.

***

Perhaps my journal can justify my life, at least to a small degree. Here I actually give what little I can. From games reviews and book reviews to warnings about the future of the world economy. In all fairness, you could get all that and probably better elsewhere too. But sometimes, once in a while, I try to look at thing from a different angle. I try to make you see the world with other eyes. I am good at that, because I live so outside things myself. I can move where most minds cannot, and I try to give you a glimpse sometimes. A view from a place you are never likely to go by yourself.

Of course, I don't know if anyone ever finds this valuable, if it ever adds a new dimension to someone's life. I can't remember hearing that it has happened so far, but perhaps some day after my passing someone will stumble on some of my stuff in some Internet archive, and start digging for the nuggets of gold in the river, or the pearls lost in the swine sty. And perhaps they will think "wow, this guy is seeing things that used to fade into the background, like a small child asking questions about things I thought was obvious". That would be nice.

But perhaps not. Perhaps only God is reading over my shoulder. Perhaps I am God's Sim, a small and limited creature living in a second-hand reality, mostly predictable but sometimes coming up with some new quirk. I wouldn't mind that, not if God is like me, only more so. If God can be amused, feel empathy, satisfaction. Like I found myself saying, or perhaps I was just thinking it, to one of the student Sims: "The joy I have given you, can never be taken away."

Of course that is not really true, because every atom in this universe is subject to decay. But time is just a dimension, and every moment of the past is still there, in the past, with just as much reality as this moment is real now. Whether anyone ever visits those memories again or not, they remain there even when the stars have grown cold. And if there is a God, then his reality has the permanence that mine lacks. And the joy He has given me can never be taken away. Not by any man, not by the Devil himself. Even though I must die – and I hope that's still far away – I have lived. Even if no one saw it.