I Know That At Age 19 I Certainly Havent Figured Out All The Secrets Of The World, And Its Likely That

I know that at age 19 I certainly haven’t figured out all the secrets of the world, and it’s likely that I’ll change my mind, and I hope I can, but for now, I think the world is more terrible than good. Now, and certainly historically. The weight of everyone who’s ever been tortured or killed or suffered weighs me down every day, and I know happiness is beautiful, but there can’t ever be enough of it to balance it out. Like Maggie Smith said, “the world is at least 50% terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate,” and she’s right. Still I know that I must persevere because I want so deeply to make this place better. However I’ve ended up here, I only want everyone to be happy.

If I were given a choice to erase it all, to erase everything on Earth, human and animal, from ever existing, I don’t know if I wouldn’t. The weight of all the pain this world has inflicted, not to me, but to everyone, is too much.

Even if the world is more bad than good, I still think we can choose hope and love.

nightmare scenario idea: music becomes like tv/film is now, and instead of having every song virtually available at your pleasure, there are now multiple sites and apps that all have different corners of the music market, sorted by stuff like their record company, and they all have different payment plans

Imagine being an early human staring at the Aurora Boraelis, everyone around you mesmerized, wandering if there’s something bigger than your day to day life

this is a thought I’m sort of ashamed of and it comes from years of having severe OCD, and it’s that I don’t think anyone deserves to go to Hell. I’ve thought a lot about how bad it would be, how terrible the idea is, and I can’t make myself truly believe anyone deserves that. I can’t

Fourth of July by Sufjan Stevens going “we’re all gonna die” over and over is so soothing to me. It doesn’t feel ironic, it doesn’t feel darkly comforting, it just feels plain comforting. We’re all gonna die. It probably sounds morbid but it’s such a calming and beautiful song.

since the jwst is on everyone's minds right now, i want to take a second to remember voyager i, our little interstellar probe that could. it's out past the sun's reach now, traveling away from us at nearly 40,000 mph. and it carries with it the "golden record".

we knew when we sent it that it would eventually leave the solar system, and would someday -- many, many years in the future -- find another star or solar system. eventually. the laws of physics demand it.

and so we put a record of ourselves with it. just in case -- in the highly unlikely, but still possible, event that it happened upon a world with intelligent life that could understand it. our message in a bottle, cast out into the endless sea of space.

we recorded our voices, in many languages. we recorded the sounds of wild animals, of insects, of water rushing. we recorded brainwaves.

ann druyan's brainwaves, in fact. an hour of them, as she thought of all kinds of things.

she and carl sagan worked on this project together, and over the course of their work, they fell in love.

she took the time, during the recordings, to think of him, and how she felt about him.

so that love -- not just earth's existence, or its sounds, or human voices, but love -- would be sent out in our message, cast out into the ocean of space, in the distant hope that someday, somewhere, something would see it and hear us, and know us, and know how we feel.

even if voyager i never finds another life in the universe, even if the golden record is never played, i think it's important that we sent it anyway. what it says about us as a people, our hope and our optimism and our faith and our love -- we cast this all out into the stars.

"dare to cast thy bread upon the sea," indeed.