62320211412 - Reference Card 1
Immortality. Not necessarily just the idea that one will live forever, but to live now as if one has lived forever already.
Note a difference between pretend and literal immortality seeking. Pretend involves seeking deeper enjoyment of now, through placing the current experience of one's life into a wider context. Literal involves extending the current now outward indefinitely, because the current now is inherently valuable or preferred in some way. I fall into the former category, bear this in mind as we go forward: I seek a pretender's immortality, a widening of my own perspective for my own pleasure and benefit in the here and now. I'm looking to extend my life beyond it's normal span, to do so would be to miss out on an important if perhaps unpleasant chapter of the experience, I think.
Speculations and fiction connects me forward in time, to what might be, or in the case of most fantasy, laterally: to what might have been an alternate now. Both are entertaining in their way.
History and nonfiction form connections both to the past, what has been, granting me a longer perspective of my own life than if I knew nothing of what had gone before, and also to the now: in the form of information, skills, and such that can be put to use during my own lifespan.
So it is primarily through reading and writing that I achieve this mental space of pretending to immortality. Naturally to be immortal I must pick portions of the past to value, so that I may benefit from my long life, stretching back to the dawn of the universe. It also feels natural to me to write forward, so that in the future, I'll know what I was now, and thereby gain something from it, even if it is just a better picture of the whole.
The idea gets really heady when if I contemplate that there is not much of a barrier between you and I, beyond that of our individual lives. Once we become only what we leave behind: our works, writings and so on, the great leveller has done it's work. Anyone might pick either of us up, and treat what remains of us as equals, or the same-yet-different, as they see fit.
Note also that to live an immortal life is to spend much of life living vicariously: through learning what has gone before, and working with an eye to the future. The now is merely the focal lense to be directed as I please in the discoverable timestream.
62320211342 - Mediocrity is The Way(related: Immortality, long view)
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