The best solution, really, is just to murder babies

-I wrote this last night in a frenzy, posted it, and then reread it. It totally made no sense and sentences didnt even match up, so I took it down and fixed some things. Are all my blogs like that? Maybe I should read through them more often before posting them.

So I’ve got a mind that talks shit to itself. It thinks too much, and occasionally brings up a rather disturbing topic, and then gets itself to thinking that following the rabbit down the rabbit-hole is a good idea, that I should be a brave mind-explorer, and not back down from what could be a good adventure no matter how dark and scary it seem. But then the other part of my mind goes, “Woah now Bryce, that just seems too dark, I am sure you will explore the thought, flesh it out, and in the end only give yourself more reasons to be depressed”
Finally the brave explorer side of my brain chimes in and goes, “ Damnit Bryce, quit being such a pussy” Now, I don’t like it when my own mind calls me out on being a huge bitch, so of course, I chase after that little rabbit of an idea and end up with things like I do now. Damnit.
So to start this off, I smoked cigarettes for a while (sorry mom and dad) but it was a relatively short few months and I no longer do it. It is quite the nasty habit, and I the best option is never starting. I’ll tell you why, but that’s not the main idea of this blog.
So smoking, which I wish I had never started, helped me to understand addiction. I now watch those intervention documentaries, and while I am sure I cannot fathom what an addiction to heroin is like, I at least no longer think to myself, “what pussies, not being able to quit, just stop doing it, it’s as simple as that” An addiction is your body convincing you that you need something, like food or air. It’s introducing a new need to your body that it never had before. Addicts aren’t addicted to the feeling, the buzz of the cigarette of the high of other drugs, they are addicted to something else in there. So now throughout the day addicts not only get hungry, thirsty, or out of breath, they also get the need for a cigarette in the same way. So in many ways quitting smoking is like fasting. It’s hard. You don’t get sick, or headaches, or anything of that sort, there’s just this need in you that nothing else can satisfy. There are substitutes that can distract from parts of it, but that satisfaction is still never met, that itch is never scratched. It also seems a permanent thing. I haven’t smoked in nearly a month, and didn’t smoke for much longer than that, but still, whenever I see someone with a cigarette, or a have a stressful situation I get this need that can only be satisfied with a cigarette. So all starting smoking does, is add another need, it’s making living more difficult. If someone told you, you can either go through living needing food and water, or you can go through needing food, water, heat, 7 hours of sleep and 3 other things. I’d pick just the food and water. Moral of the story: Don’t start smoking.
Anyway, having an addiction to something almost irrefutably unhealthy made me think about what other things in life I have dependcy for and I got to thinking about all those belief systems, those ascetics, that encourage one to strip themselves of their belongings, because in reality I don’t need clothes, I’m just addicted to them. I don’t need fancy food, I’m just addicted to it. I know when I am stressed out sometimes I eat really tasty food, it’s merely satisfying an addiction. So these people shed themselves of everything, they can live without. They even sometimes take it a step further and shed the relationships they treasure, because I’m sure those are just addictions as well. We don’t really need any of those things.
So to take step further I got to thinking that in all reality life could just be the ultimate addiction of our mind. One thing I learned about addiction is that when I was trying to quit smoking my mind would play all sorts of tricks trying to convince me that cigarette smoking was actually a beneficial and good thing. Your addiction tries to convince you first that it’s not there, and then that it is there, but it’s a good thing to have. I don’t kid about this in the slightest bit. I came extremely close to buying another pack on several occasions because of my mind’s tricks. On one occasion I was planning to stay in even though I had been invited to go drinking on the town, but because I was trying to quit my mind convinced me that it should go out, and then while I was out, and slightly intoxicated, it tricked me into bumming a cigarette off of someone. I wasn’t aware that it had gone on until really thinking about it the next day.
So, let’s just say all the things we see in life as good, and the things we enjoy in life are really just our addiction manifesting itself. If life truly is the ultimate addiction of our mind then I am sure the tricks our minds play to convince ourselves that it is actually good are much trickier than a simple nicotine addiction, especially since this has been going on for centuries. Our minds have been stacking bullcrap (thanks Neil) for thousands of years, convincing us that our addiction to life and all this is within it is a good thing.
If you think about one of life’s ultimate addictions, -sex, -procreation it makes one think. The mind is addicted to life, and through that addiction creates more of the substance it is addicted to. Life could really just be the ultimate addict, so convinced that it’s addiction is a positive thing that life of all forms has reproduced and swarmed over the entire planet, feeding it’s addiction. We view life as beautiful and resilient, but if that’s truly just a virus-like addiction, or a devil’s plot convincing us to stay alive by forming an addiction and so convincing us that this life addiction is a positive force in the world, then it seems far more sinister.
If this is truly how things are, the truly cold turkey quitter would off himself on the spot. So in this sense life and death are really battling, death will always get the person in the end, but if the person dies, and always deep down had fond memories of life and all it entailed, death hasn’t truly won. A total win for death is someone entering death completely reviling all that life entails, and 100% believing that death is a better option. A 100% win in this situation cannot happen for life because all people will die. The best life can do is make the win less satisfying for death.
So the thing is that most of these beliefs that propose we strip ourselves of all of our addictions to life propose that we do so because that way we can enter death, with no attachment or addictions to this world, making death win entirely. So if the ultimate goal in this situation, assuming these Ascetics are correct, is to enter death with no attachments to this world, maybe those folks who walk around hating life from day to day will really be the kings of death, far more prepared for it than the rest of us who take enjoyment. The easiest solution seems it would just be to kill every newborn child before it has a chance to open it’s eyes. That way the baby won’t have time to form any attachments or addictions. Actually, to take it a step further, people should not procreate, because even in the womb babies from addictions. The solution really seems to be complete and total genocide of all living species. Nuclear holocaust? Maybe Saturn, Mars, Pluto and all the other lifeless space entities are really far ahead of us in this sense. At least if we eliminate all of life, life and death cannot use us as pawns in this sick battle.
WELL SHIT, but here’s the thing, following all of this. If death is inevitable, and you cannot really die if you have never been alive, both are inevitable, life and death. Maybe it is incorrect to view them as opposing one another, as battling for wins over human souls but as two separate inevitabilities. I will live, and then I will die. I will live my hardest, so that when I die, I will be well trained for the afterlife. Whether or not the training I will receive in life will come in handy at all in the afterlife, chances are it’s better than having no training in any art, coming into death skill-less. Then again, maybe weakness is strength, and ignorance intelligence in death. Death is just bizarro-land and any training we have for life will really just hinder us in death, actually proving to be a practice in weakness.

But then again maybe death is just the end of life and we are silly to think that there has to be something more, I mean we thought it up, right?

Maybe we shouldn’t think too much about it, but then again maybe that’s our addiction telling us that we shouldn’t investigate, because then we would discover the addiction. Heck people thought cigarettes were great, then when we discovered it was bad and addictive we tried to wipe it out.

Idunno man