JackRaynes

The title is a lyric from a Bo Burnham song called, "Hell of a Ride."
I thought it was pretty clever and wanted to share because recently I've been dealing with this concept and was struggling with trying to find a way out of it.

With me the rabbit hole started a few months ago when my friend's brother and his girlfriend died in a car accident. I've had a lot of people in my life past away for ridiculous reasons and this situation came at a bad time for me, especially dealing with alcoholism. When I heard about the incident I started researching them because I needed answers on why they were killed. After finding out what I could about them, I came to the conclusion that they didn't deserve to die. Obviously, I'm not a god, I can't determine that, but based off the information that I had about them they were just good kids who loved each other and helped their community out as much as possible. This kind of lifted my whole "we're here for a purpose" mindset. Then it just kept getting deeper because the people in my life that inflict misery are still walking around while the couple was killed in the accident. It just enraged me a bit and I couldn't get to a point of handling it especially with all of my darkness going on with alcoholism.

So, you're probably thinking I'm going to keep going on how much I hate the universe. I don't. I think everything is overwhelmingly beautiful and complex and I sometimes can't stand it. I love science, I love learning about life, and I don't naturally think pessimistically about. But for a brief moment I did feel that way and the thing that kind of snapped me out of it was a book by Michio Kaku, "Physics of the Future." Mostly because in the introduction, he explains that he became interested in science because a famous scientist had died and a lot of his work was unfinished. That famous scientist ended up being Albert Einstein, and that inspired Kaku to get involved with science because he wanted to grow up to continue the work. Now, the reason why I am bringing this is up is because turning my brief moment in time where I gave up on everything, I had this mindset that "there's no point in helping people because we're all going to die, we're not even close to expanding into the galaxy, and we worry more about the Kardashians than our space program, so screw it." But after reading that section of the book, it kind of opened my eyes a bit. It coincidentally clicked that yeah we might not be able to see how our work will affect people immediately, but if we don't try to help each other out than that idea of expanding into the galaxy and saving ourselves will be pointless. The book also had a quote from Helen Keller:
No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars or sailed to an uncharted land or opened a new heaven to the human spirit.
-Helen Keller

Right, so in conclusion, awful and terrible things are going to happen that we don't have control over. But giving up hope in humanity and ourselves isn't going to solve the problem. And I'm only bringing this up because it was what caused me to drink again a few weeks ago and this is just a current issue I was able to resolve so that I don't have those tendencies to drink because of those problems.