Jan 16, 2021

Getting older

It’s weird. Who else is freaking out about it?

A life that wasn’t mine until a few decades ago, is now something I cling onto even though I don’t own it. I can’t own it. Our lives aren’t for us to keep. They’re ours to borrow and return in what will probably feel like a short period of time.

I don’t believe in an afterlife. I think religious books are a collection of fictional stories that might have useful lessons in them, but I can’t take them seriously. I wish I could. I would be less anxious if I didn’t think this was all going to end so abruptly.

However, one somewhat optimistic thought I have about death is that maybe I’m not really Jeff Cannon. Maybe we’re just playing characters in a simulation. In a higher reality, we chose to wipe our memories, go back in time, and live as if we’re living through the dawn of the Internet.

Being born in this time period does feel like a strange coincidence. We could have been born in any time period. But in this one, we are approaching what seems like such a critical inflection point with technology that part of me believes that the singularity already happened.

Imagine a future where you can live forever and there’s so much abundance that nobody has to do anything that they don’t want to do. You have unlimited time and resources. It would basically be heaven.

It would also probably get so boring that people would create simulations such as this one to entertain themselves.