EndGameNYC

The thing of it is, you don't have to know. The need to know before we do anything of importance is an unfortunate hangover from Twentieth-Century thinking. It encourages a drive towards the normalization of all things, where explanations and descriptions of people and things replace knowing and believing. It encourages envy of a lethal caliber towards, and the ultimate dismissal of, excellence, and finally discourages the desire to explore and discover, and instead rewards "averageness" as a preemptive antidote for fear and doubt.

You're eighteen years old, and someone offers you a long but average life, with average highs and lows, average interpersonal experiences, and average rewards. Or, you can choose a life of unknown consequences, including your own longevity, with the likelihood of experiencing your greatest dreams and your worst nightmares in unequal measure. A life of unpredictable suffering. Which would you choose?

I would go as far as to argue that, with the kinds of things we're discussing, knowing adds nothing to the process and can, in fact, be harmful. The ability to predict is the Rosetta Stone in science, but does very little in terms of living a good life.

You're an atheist, a non-believer, or a person without faith. A worshipper at the altar of science, or just someone who relies primarily on common sense. Maybe you carry the misguided notion that science somehow "trumps" God, or even that science has sproven that God does not exist. It hasn't. It mostly doesn't care.

Or you're a God-fearing Christian, someone who invokes a Higher Power, or who believes that faith is much more powerful than anything that is knowable. All of the squabbling over whether or not God exists, or that even the idea of God is helpful or hurtful, is essentially an endless debate over nothing, with the empty, meaningless benefits of such an enterprise falling perfectly and inexorably in line with the purposelessness of the debate itself. All of this saber-rattling in the name of belief and non-belief has brought "both sides" of this (to me) petty argument to the same exact place in terms of your addictions.

It doesn't matter. We are all someday going to die, and we're all going to die of something. For many of us, this will be much sooner than we allow ourselves to imagine. The only thing left to do is to act.

Problems around life and death don't care about what anyone believes in. Don't care about personal convictions. Don't care that you place yourself above others due to your beliefs or your lack of beliefs. Life and death go on without our principles, no matter how genuine we are in protecting them from rational or irrational influences.

The idea is to stop killing ourselves, to stop alienating ourselves from the larger group because we have some special mission or calling, because our history has made us separate, and somehow much better or much worse than other people, or because we believe that we've been endowed with a special way of seeing the world that is inaccessible to everyone else. No one cares as much as you might imagine they do. The idea is to get sober, and to do that, we often have to leave behind the things of a child.

The idea is to find a better way for yourself, and then find the courage to live it.

"When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." -- C.S. Lewis