a strange moment of mono no aware

[postrodent]

Comments

[postrodent]

It's a laundromat, but a laundromat where *you're not there*. :)

Scraps and drops is pretty much what I've left behind so far, and the scraps mostly weren't half as well written as yours. :) I hope to do a little more, but this probably has as much to do with my overactive sense of duty as anything else. I'm sure at least a few of my ambitious plans will backfire hilariously.

[paka]

That's the thing about transience and attachment, you know? We do lots of things which seem utterly crucial while we're stuck in the middle of them, and in the larger sense, eh, they aren't. Or at least not immediately vital, I believe there's a weird societal tide build up from the millions of people making their own weird little decisions and on a smaller scale from the cumulative effect of an individual's life. For example, I think Henri Tolouse-Latrec was an incredible artist, but he wouldn't have become what he had if not for a lot of now-long-forgotten Parisians creating the culture he inhabited, including himself - he spent how much time diddling prostitutes, watching imminently forgettable theater, or just staring out the window, for every second of sheer painterly brilliance he exhibited

[postrodent]

No, I see where you're going. This moment -- any moment -- has its own nature. Nothing is ever static. Even if you're spending that moment bored shitless at a data entry job, there's so much going on in the sphere around you, and the sphere around _that_, and pretty soon we're looking at a huge range of activities ranging from the equally banal to the wildly, terribly dramatic, even if the drama is just a needle falling on a gauge.

[paka]

And at some level, I think it's okay to accept things as kinda subjectively judged as long as I don't get totally obsessive about it. My moment of crap data entry job is theoretically as transient, valid, individual and surrounded by the ever-changing flow of experience as my last orgasm, but I can definitely tell you which one I liked more. Perception isn't necessarily reality, but it's still a pretty worthwhile thing in its own way.

[xyzzysqrl]

You know... I'm okay with that. I can just let go of worries and concerns, and focus on making people happy, on making people a little more able to tolerate their days before they end.

Which sounds kind of sanctimonious of me, now that I think of it. Ah well!

[crankycoyote]

I love both history and geography for the sense of perspective they give. When you can look at ten feet of rock, point to an inch of it, and say "that there is about as long as we've existed as a species", that brings the insignificance home for me.

[postrodent]

But we matter so very much to ourselves. Surely that must mean something. ;)

More seriously, I could feel better about being insignificant and possibly doomed if I were more confident that some other sentience was gonna get to play the Ascent to Transcendance game.

[crankycoyote]

I'm not sure - maybe if we mattered less to ourselves as individuals, we would last longer as a species. Or maybe not; it's rather amazing that given the amount of individual energy one person can wield we have as few people blowing themselves up for what they see as the betterment of humanity as a whole.

I figure the probabilities built into the Drake equation are high enough that somewhere else, some other sapients, probably a whole lot of other sapients, are playing that game too - the universe is a big, old place. It won't be a human transcendence, but then again, once you do the Big T that's probably kind of irrelevant anyway. Anyway, it's not like we're anywhere close to out of the game as a species; we've got a long way to go for that. Individually, of course, the odds of making it are pretty much zero.