I have an intermittent pain in my elbow joint. I realize that instead of fading away with time, it is going to become chronic. No doubt, the older we get, the more pronounced the defects and deficiencies in our frame become. Ergo, I fail to understand why we as a species, strive to cling harder to life as the years roll by.
There are two kinds of people in this world. The first, talk of dying young, perhaps out of a narcissistic and vainglorious desire of emulating an icon who commercialized the teenage angst that most of us struggle through, and then ate a bullet or a potent combination of chemicals, thereby, dying young. Though they would never admit it, their prime motivation is a sado-masochistic fantasy that they will leave behind others to mourn, suffer and weep for them. This category also includes those who are quite simply terrified of reaching a feeble and decrepit age when you need help even to wipe your own arse (personally, I fall in this classification). It is the rationale of the second category that I find so hard to comprehend. Why would you aspire to reach a grand old age, all the while being encumbered by a debilitating and rapidly deteriorating body?
I refuse to accept that homo sapiens in their present state are the pinnacle of evolution. As the great Christopher Hitchens so succinctly puts it, " Our prefrontal lobes are too small, our adrenal glands are too big and our reproductive organs apparently designed by committee". Undoubtedly, the knowledge that this short life is all we have has been anathema to the majority of our species and hence we have the concept of the afterlife, which I shall write about in my next post.
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