A few days ago there was a highly upvoted
Shower Thought on Reddit:
One of the most bittersweet feelings has to be
when you realise how much you’re going to miss a moment,while you’re still living it.
I really like this phrasing.
When chatting with my girlfriend about high school,
she told me she had a feeling like this:
“During senior year of high school, the study pressure was heavy,
everyone was very exhausted.
Even though I was also exhausted,
I wasn’t unhappy at all.
Because the me back then clearly knew:
this is my high school life, with one day less every day.”
What a wonderful,
light-novel-like description.
Time is truly amazing.
One night when I was five years old,
I suddenly understood something clearly:
human beings die.
Before that,
I had only accepted this fact intellectually,
but that night,
it was as if a printer pressed this fact into my heart.
A massive fear surrounded me.
As time flowed on,
that night also gradually receded into life.
But the more I thought,
the heavier the loneliness brought by death.
A few solid facts stand before me:
- We are insignificant.
One reason I really like the Fate anime series is that:
it brings heroes from each era together into the same time and space,
and showcases the clashes of their values.
Once when Waver was feeling low,
Alexander the Great pointed at the world map and said to him with a smile:
“Look, the world I conquered back then,
is only this small piece on the map.
On the map, how big are you? How big am I?
We are nothing more than a drop in the ocean of the world.”
Time always moves forward.
Even if I could change humanity,
I could only change humanity for a few decades.
- We will all die.
What if I could leave a legacy for my own age that benefits a thousand years to come?
A legacy benefiting a thousand years has nothing to do with me.
In “The Lion King”,
Mufasa takes little Simba to play on the grasslands.
That night the sky was bright with stars,
and Mufasa told Simba a story:
“We lions have a legend,
that every one of our ancestors who passed away
becomes a star in the sky.
Whenever you look up at the night sky,
and see the stars twinkling,
that’s our ancestors watching you.”
In other legends, religions, myths,
there are always similar sayings.
We can’t change fate,
we can only change our own thoughts.
What foolish humans, meow.
- We can only think for ourselves.
In elementary school I read a lot of “Children’s Literature” magazine.
There was a short story in it that I particularly liked.
The plot summary is: a programmer created an online game world,
he fell in love with a virtual NPC in it,
and in the end he discovered that he was also an NPC that had been created.
This story shares the same idea as “The Truman Show” and “Saya no Uta”,
just like the saying that used to circulate on BBS:
“On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”
No wonder humans are rated as a 5B-level civilization in Liu Cixin’s “The Village Teacher”:
“Captain. Are you an idiot?!”
The fleet commander raged,
“Are you trying to tell us
that a species without genetic memory,
that communicates information among each other through sound waves,
and at an unbelievable rate of 1 to 10 bits per second,
could create a 5B-level civilization?!
And that this civilization evolved automatically without any external advanced civilization cultivating it?!”“But, Your Excellency, it is so.”
“But in this case,
this species fundamentally cannot accumulate and pass on knowledge between generations,
which is essential for civilizational evolution!”“They have a certain kind of individual,
in certain numbers,
distributed in every corner of this population.
These individuals serve as a medium for the transmission of knowledge between two generations of life forms.”“Sounds like a myth.”
“No,”
said the senator:
“In the ancient times of galactic civilization,
this concept did indeed exist,
but even back then it was extremely rare.
Apart from us specialists who study the evolutionary history of galactic civilizations,
very few people know of it.”“You mean those individuals that transmit knowledge between two generations of life forms?”
“They’re called teachers.”
Having lived until now,
I may have spent a quarter of my free time pondering these kinds of questions.
In senior year of high school, I also discussed this with my physics teacher.
(My high school physics teacher was a really impressive person.
He had finished college before age eighteen,
and by his thirties had been teaching physics for over twenty years…)
But even back then he couldn’t convince me,
mainly because a few questions were too ultimate:
“Why do humans live?
If the world will be destroyed eventually, do humans have meaning?
Even if I am a special human, can I do anything different?”
If you can give me your answers
to these questions,
then I know a really delicious cake shop,
my treat.
May the world be at peace.
Carpe Diem.