I’ve always regarded humanity and mortality as something of limited significance. We live anywhere from minutes to decades, perhaps even a century if we’re lucky, and then we simply disappear. Physically we just deteriorate and melt into pools of various elements, but what is even worse is mentally we simply disappear. Those religiously inclined believe our souls will ascend (or descend) into some invisible realm of greater understanding, as if our brief time on this plane were to teach us a lesson about something, but what possible lesson could our mortality teach us?

Sure, we can learn skills, take up arts, perform experiments, there are so many things one can do with their lives, however limited that may be, but so many of us fail to tap into barely 0.00001% of that total possibility.

Even something simple as visiting another country, I’ve never been to one, even Canada or Mexico, and it’s unlikely I will ever see another country in my lifetime unless I am lucky. I wasn’t born in another country, or raised in a family that could afford it, or if we could, we never tried. Could I possibly do it now? Probably. But is it practical?

Therein lies the issue I face on a daily basis. Choice. Freedom. Will. Each day I have a variety of choices, but each day I wake up around the same time, get into the same car, and drive to the same job. I work eight hours, I get back in my car, and I go home, all to do it the next day. People do this, for nearly fifty years of their ridiculously short life-spans. In the time we aren’t working to make the almighty dollar needed simply to live, we try to find the time to do all of the things we believe will enrich our lives and those of our family. We choose to have a backyard grill-out with neighbors. We have the freedom to take a summer drive in the car to an ice cream shop. We willingly take the kids to a theme park. For some, happiness equals reality minus expectations, and many believe that when our realities don’t meet our expectations, we must not be happy. I guess in that case I either have a warped reality, or lowered expectations.

It is no secret I am afraid of death. I just am. I cannot wrap my mind around the concept of simply ceasing to exist at any given moment, especially by purely arbitrary and artificial means. It’s almost criminal that the very ability that gives us total control over our personal reality also gives others the ability to cancel our reality, and go so far as to wipe it completely from the group conscious. It’s no wonder power and control are among the top of humanity’s needs and wants, because to be able to control a group or even an entire populace gives you the sort of satisfaction from believing you have brought order to chaos, that you have neatly organized everyone’s problems by taking away another’s ability to negate one’s personal reality. What you don’t realize is your control is simply another extension of the very same thing. You stop someone else from encroaching on another, but at the very same time you are encroaching on them.

I’m always left to wonder that if I were immortal, that I was the only one and no one else around me, with eternity to explore every facet of the universe, touch every rock, swim in every body of water, build a tower, create art, sculpt a statue, would I achieve what most people set forth in their limited spans of life and often never accomplish? Would I become one with the universe given infinite time? Perhaps the reason we’re only here such a short time is because man was only ever meant to perform in their limited capacity for a short time, and pass their genes on to the next generation to continue what they started, only choice, freedom, and will cause each new generation to spiral off into a different tangent. A new reality. A new purpose.

In the end, death is inevitable. It’s something no one prepares for, even when they know it is coming. You’ll spend your entire life wondering what could be and should be, but after it is all gone, there is nothing left to worry about. Someone else will come along and either continue where you left off, or start in a new direction. There are billions and trillions of faces in this world, impossible for any one person to know them all, or their story, or their achievements. Status and fame elevate some higher than others, their names etched into history to be remembered by all. But most will fade away, only to be remembered by close family and friends, until eventually they become a record in a book, or lost in time. I often think that it’s not so much death itself that scares me, but the fact that mortality in this existence is simply fraught with so many unknowns and so many inconsistencies that it makes living that personal reality that much more precious, even when you aren’t doing anything but sitting on a computer typing this.

Happiness does not equal reality minus expectations. Happiness equals probability plus expectations. Everything in a future is uncertain, the probabilities being any number of percentages based on selections and choices made in the present. How happy you are today cannot have an effect on how happy you will be tomorrow, since you don’t know what will happen tomorrow until it becomes now. But you expect each new day to be better than the last, because until that future comes and you make a choice or experience an event that triggers you to be unhappy, your happiness will stay positive until that moment arrives. Your expectation will always be that you won’t experience that event, and you will be happy with the intended result of that choice. What you don’t experience are the consequences of the actions and choices you did not make. It’s impossible to know what might have been.

Humanity is bound by this reality, the constant present-future shift where each minute we’re alive moving forward in time brings forth a shifting and changing reality around us. We cling to the past and reference it often because we cannot let go of those “good times”, the happiness that we attained by making the right choices, where we try hard to block out the bad choices we made that made us unhappy. We strive not to make bad choices, mistakes. With such precious little time on this world, we’re conditioned only to make good choices that promote our growth and expansion as complex beings. Death and disappearance aren’t on our minds because we concentrate only on the good. We inflate our expectations of the future each day and place our hopes and dreams on people we believe will realize those futures, often with tragic consequences when we realize their personal reality doesn’t match our own.

Humanity will always strive to shed the mortal coil, because humanity will always find a reason to be something it is, and something it is not. We have less than eighty years, if we’re lucky, to make our impression as individuals on this Earth, and for most of us, that impression will never be made when compared to the collective. Our only hope is to understand that we exist simply to govern ourselves, and if we choose so, others, and that together we can become something more, but divided we simply fade away into someone else’s future.