I say “we need to have fun before we die” a lot, because, well, we will die. But I’ve been feeling kind of, scared now. Scared of growing up and getting old.
There’s this album called “Everywhere at the End of Time” and it’s 6 hours long. It’s an artistic approach to Dementia, which is known to cause memory loss and confusion in the brain. I used to think of dementia as like, oh it’s just another tragic disease. But seeing what it can do is terrifying. To think that your mind could die before your body does. When you can’t remember anything, and forget forgetting. It’s terrifying. If someone I knew slowly began to lose their memory, I’d be very sad and even sadder because I can’t do anything to help it. If I started to lose my memory, at first I’d be very stressed and confused. But when it does come, I won’t know what happened because I won’t remember anything. That… is the scary part. Having lived your life to its full extent, doing so many things, experiencing so many stories, and just forgetting it. And what makes it sad is that this can happen while you’re alive. While you have a body. So you could still walk around and breathe, but your mind could be lost. Death is different, because (in my opinion) you’d be at peace after dying. Well I can’t say for sure because no one exactly knows what death is like.
I’m also scared of the fact that EVERYTHING will be forgotten one day. My favorite things like Minecraft will be forgotten eventually. And that’s not a nice fact… Minecraft has been getting updates consistently for years, and to think that it will have one last update, one final update. Well, this is speaking from my perspective because I love Minecraft. But apply this to literally anything. For example, I don’t remember my great-grandparents much. I don’t even remember their faces. I could look at a photo of them and be like, “oh that’s my great-grandpa” but I’d have no emotional connection to the photo.
That’s another reason why we’re so attached to things we knew in our life, for example, our relatives, a favorite actor, a favorite singer, etc. Things that we didn’t know in our life however, let’s say for me, World Wars for example. People older than me might have a connection to those times because they experienced it/their parents experienced it. There’s also things that have ended before we even were born, but we have a connection to them. I was a big Michael Jackson fan as a kid (and still am, haha) yet he died a day before I turned 3, and I didn’t even know who he was at that time.
That brings me to another point, which is we should be grateful for all the technology that can surpass human memory in terms of keeping records. Videos, photos, audio recordings. All of that is easily accessible today. I used to hate photos when I was younger, but as I grew up I understood why some people love taking photos. To keep memories that we might forget.
If I’m already old and hardly remember anything and you told me to look at old family photos, I might not know anything about them at all. Or even feel emotion. Those old photos would simply serve as a documentation for future generations. Humans do like documenting stuff, huh?
Basically the whole point of writing this was the first sentence of the first paragraph. Idk anymore
