metonymy4u

When we are young I think we live with a biological kind of faith. The hope of youth is necessary to get us out of the nest into a dangerous world to create and pro-create. And so our ancestors sent that trait on to us, and we experience it during our growing up years. But then we age, and the illusions are stripped away. Dreams die. The reality of a punishing experience sets in. We realize, as Kant pointed out, that there is no there there. And we may try, as Nietzsche suggested, to transform our stories from a “so it occurred” to a “thus I willed it.” The hope of youth being gone, I find this ineffective. For me each attempt gathers a senescence of faith, a recurrent knowledge of decay, and a greater understanding of futility. Each disappointment, each death, each squandered hope, each conformation of the world to the entropy of a meaningless universe is something that the hopeful illusions of youth are no longer able to gloss over any longer. At times I wonder if Schopenhauer was correct when he suggested that life for humans is an illness, and death the only cure. What do you think?