Why I don't like the fantasy genre very much.

I'm not a huge fan of the fantasy genre. I'm not a hater, and I can certainly tolerate a good story. But I'm just not that into it.

From the library I borrowed Promethea Book One by Alan Moore and J.H. Williams, a fantasy graphic novel. While reading this I figured out why I don't like fantasy novels. The characters can't really die. Or if they do die, they can come back to life.

In this story, the main character is from a fantasy-realm that takes place in our imaginations and simply cannot die. That bores me.

How can I feel scared for a character if they can't truly die? If I know the character can come back to life, well, that's boring.

Same problem with video games. If you die you can always start over.

The most interesting worlds are the ones where death is permanent and inevitable. Like our world.

Self-help is a way of avoiding death.

The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said that we humans often cope with the anxiety of our impending death through religion.

Another way we cope with death is to, "Bravely throw myself into acts of 'defiant self-creation'. In other words, by making something of ourselves. By self-helping ourselves so that we become immortal.

Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein sum up the idea in their book Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates: Using Philosophy (and Jokes!) to Explore Life, Death, the Afterlife, and Everything in Between:

Think positive thoughts! Dare to dream the impossible dream! Visualize great goals! Harness the secret powers of the law of attraction! Then my life will have meaning, and that meaning will transcend death. (p.40)

Perhaps. Or maybe self-help is just a way of trying to succeed. I think it's presumptuous to dismiss a whole ares of self-knowledge by saying "it's a way of denying death".

Although, I do find myself wanting to agree with Soren Kierkegaard. I generally think poorly of the self-help movement. I view it as a way of voluntary brainwashing yourself, and I think that self-help ultimately leads to depression through narcissism.

Oh my GOD Michael Jackson died!!!!!!

Holy crap! Michael Jackson died of heart failure. Holy crap!

I remember growing up to Michael Jackson. I loved him. I had his Thriller and Off the Wall albums. My friend Jason dressed up as Micheal Jackson for Halloween.

He was great. At the end of the 80s he started getting a little weird. He burned his hair during the Pepsi commercial and then slowly disfigured himself through a succession of surgeries.

He became a bizarre, eccentric dude. I always felt sorry for him. Now he's dead. Hard to believe. They're saying it's a drug overdose. Poor guy. He was so young.

The void.

When life gets tough you can always say:

"Oh sweet void. Absorb me into your nothingness!"

It will happen one day. You'll die and all there will be is void. Forever. An infinite, blank, blackness stretching to infinity.

You will be wiped out. Your thoughts, memories, aches and pains, all obliterated into a vast emptiness.

I'm told the void is kind of like the way things were before you were born. What was it like for you thousands of years ago? It wasn't like anything.

Likewise, thousands, millions, billions of years from now it won't be like anything.

I'm told you shouldn't fear the void because fearing it would be like fearing the darkness between eye blinks. When the void happens, it's simultaneously instantaneous and infinite. The void immediately stretches an instant of blackness into infinity.

I'm told the void is like going to bed late at night when you're really tired. That moment just as you drift off to sleep. Only you never wake up.

Time gets faster as we get older, but what if it was the opposite?

As we get older, time seems to fly faster and faster. When I was a kid summer holidays lasted FOREVER. Now summer feels like 3 weeks. Imagine when I'm 95! A summer will feel like a day!


What if this was the opposite? What if time went by slower and slower as we got older, and flew by when we were kids? I think that would be worse.


Children lead the best lives. Everything is done for them. They play all day. They don't have to worry about money. They laugh a lot. If this went by in a blink of an eye, they'd miss out on the best times of their lives.


Meanwhile, getting older kind of sucks. If time slowed every year it would mean a sort of slow, extended agony. If you were really old and really sick, imagine how much worse you would feel if every day felt like a month.


"Come on kill me now!" you'd scream. "Time hurry up and go by so I can die!" Some people already feel like that.