if you’re new to these essays, please know that they make no sense and are incredibly stupid. they are a series of loosely related ramblings about whatever the fuck was in my stupid head. in five months they might find out i was suffering from a late stage syphilitic delirium and provide these essays as evidence to the cdc. but i am a firm believer that if you get a gross disease you should at least monetize it before it takes you out.
i have recently been thinking a lot about dying, and about if, when i die, i will feel i had lived a fulfilling life. in an effort to aim myself in the right direction, i have created a graph to help visualise how good your life is.
the x-axis is the passage of time, how long you live. the y-axis is the scope of your experiences, how far reaching and novel they are. and then the dots are the experiences themselves; each thing that happens to you, or that you feel, retain, or experience as a Moment.
the goal is to have as many dots as possible. now, if you are trotting along at a boring but consistent pace (bank manager, decently cool kids and a fridge with the ice cube thing built into the door) you can assume that the longer your x-axis or y-axis, the more dots you will have. if you live longer, or if you go on a cool trip, that will bring along with it more experiences. but nobody knows for sure - the dot distribution can be highly variable and unpredictable.
here are a few illustrated examples to illuminate possible dot outcomes.
dying isn’t really scary because of dying, dying is scary because of the loss of possibility. that you get this One life that is X amount of time and you get to do Z amount of things. but i think the good news is that the world is not built in discrete units - it is categorised into discrete units, but it is not built by them. time doesn’t exist in seconds, it is only described in seconds. you can imagine increasingly smaller and smaller measurements of time until they cease to exist at all, like how if you add an infinite number of sides to a polygon eventually it approaches a circle. if there are a fuck ton of dots everywhere, an infinite amount, it doesn’t matter that you’re not going to live forever, it’ll still kick ass.
a small aside on this system: there are of course four quadrants, as is the nature of any graph. they are likely not going to be of much consequence to you but should nonetheless be discussed before we part ways:
if you made it all the way here, a sincere thank you for reading!! if you feel like subscribing i have a free subscription option, or a paid subscription option that helps support my work and features bonus articles (the juicy stuff). if you do not want to subscribe and this is the last time we will ever talk please know that i wish you the best and i will think about you forever.
love,
maddie