/thoughts

The Beginning is at The End.

2025-05-02: The End, Cont.

I remembered a word today. Anemoia. "Nostalgia for a time you've never known". I believe that this word comes pretty close to defining a feeling I've never been able to properly define, but is related to my prior musings below. It is a feeling I get from media like movies, video games, and even certain music. Especially those that present a place, or a world, or a setting, devoid of life. Perhaps the best example I can conjure, is the original Dark Souls.

While not devoid of all life by any means, the world of Dark Souls is certainly a dying world, if not a dead one. And it has been that way for a long time.

On paper, that must sound pretty depressing, but there is this ethereal - fleeting yet present - beauty in that world, and while I can certainly feel moments of deep melancholy, I'm never really quite depressed. Of course, Dark Souls is fiction, and therefore not something to get truly depressed over, but the point, I think, still stands. 'Tis an example of melancholic anemoia.

And I find this emotion, this feeling... Soothing? Peaceful? Humbling, even?

2025-03-14: The End

Everything ends, and I find solace in that. The entire human history, everything that we were, are, and will be, is but a tiny speck of dust in an infinite cosmos. The entire history of our species, of our planet, of life as we know it, is but an imperceptibly tiny fraction of a moment, and nothing more.

This, I feel, is very comforting. Very freeing. Because nothing you accomplish matters in the grand scheme of things. Nothing that we accomplish doesn't matter, as far as the universe is concerned.

But just because we live in an uncaring, indifferent universe, does not mean that our lives lack meaning. Far from it, the fact that we even are here, able to perceive these things, and to ponder, and to conclude, that ours is a meaningless existence, gives us the freedom to define our own reason for being.

And that, is a very personal thing. Perhaps, a journey.