12th June 2025
The moment one is conscious of one’s place in the world, the world starts a countdown to take away one’s consciousness.
Then begins the maladies, jealousy, the tit for tat, fear, hunger, the fight, diseases, and worries.
Worries about the future.
Near future.
Mid future.
Long future.
The near future is never near as one floats away in a daily struggle.
The struggle for fame.
The struggle for money.
The struggle for the world to accept.
When the struggles coalesce and one discovers one’s place in the world, hair turns white.
One consoles oneself with nostalgia and wonders about the missed dreams, the missed lives, the missed careers, and quietly asks – was it worth the struggle?
As one reminiscence, the world pushes you to the mid-future.
The future of the kids.
The future in new homes.
The future in a world that stops noticing you.
Corporations ask the wagers about the long future.
Nobody dares to say my long-term future is to depart in peace.
Like every achievement one celebrates and imprints into digital memories for the world to judge, everyone should write down the year they would die.
The science is settled.
75-80 is all one person should dare to aspire to.
The longevity hackers and gym bros have all fallen to the cruelty of time.
Some at 60. Some at 40. Most in their 70s.
Many cut their heads off for a future when a genie could re-alive them from the jar.
The genie is science.
We were promised flying cars.
I waited and waited. It is 2025. I see none.
I have found acceptance.
I will die by 2060.
I looked at the 1960s people as aliens with bubble-gum dresses and bee-hive hairstyles.
In just a 100-year, I will be under a bubble-gum spat by some foolhardy boy, unaware that my cells have decomposed, turned into carbon, mixed with oxygen, and now float around the world.
He inhales me with great disturbance, exhaling my essence.
Trees are kinder. They take me in and turn me into life.
I am more attractive now.
People need me.
They inhale doses of me.
Their eyes widen at the relief of my essence.
I give them nanoseconds of life.
Life, they think, is infinite.
And so they make merry. Break hearts. Climb ladders. Blinded by worldly worries – unaware that they will join me in just 80 years.
We will float away. Irritate the nostrils of the amateurs of life.
And then we will wait 80 years to see the amateur float with us.
Together, we will float away.
We will float away.