To Those in Pain

Our lives are like the videogame, Minecraft, not so good at the graphics, but we do the job. Consider your worldview, consider how, in this world, you see and join people who fight each other over things that are not people - corporations, religions, aliens, AI, political parties, wealth, and all of that. And the worldview is like Minecraft, with meh graphics, but each worldview does the job. 

We interact with this world and so many worldviews.

Our lives are entrenched in information, data coming to us as charged particles and chemical signals from all the senses and from our own minds. For many of us, the stimulation is flat and meaningless. We experience one-note lives pulsing out the cadence that carries us to our final credits. While for others, we float in a churning miasma of just too much stuff. 

I get it. 

We learn early on that the one thing that will make each of us free of anxiety is to find something else to do. For too many of us, it feels like your life must finally be ending if you can't find the next thing to do. In our world, the final sentence in the book about the life of anyone seems to be “Then there was nothing left to do.” 

But the story does not end this way. The story ending in such a way only makes sense to people who listen to the none-note rhythm of nonsense, listen to the repetitive shouting pulse of the world.

Instead, we should regard the noise of the world as a terrible laughter, the morbid humor of death, war, famine, and plague. 

This terrible laughter is the signal of pain and anxiety. 

The problem with pain is that it takes our attention from being. We focus on the pain or the anxiety of anticipating pain, unable to ignore the unnecessary stimuli in our lives that carries the pain. The overwhelming pain of all this information doesn't help us understand. 

If I could, I’d place black rectangles over the aches in my body and anxieties in my life with the text, “CENSORED”, obscuring the offense, allowing me to tolerate this pain, tolerate this anxiety. We have these anxieties and pain always, it seems. It's almost as if we transform our outcry at the start of our existence into a spreading expression of aching from birth to death. Knowing the pain is merely noise, we rest in the sound. We hold ourselves to the course of this life, despite the shouting.

Then we'll let go, and there won't be anything left to do.

By Andrew Birden, December 13, 2024

AI art courtesy of NightCafe and SDXL 1.0 with the title as the prompt.