Last night I had a beautiful dream. There were a lot of my good friends growing up all gathered on one single place, a football match. There's even faces that I forgot existed, it has been years since I saw or talk to them, yet my brain somehow remembers. In the dream, I sometimes play and sometimes sit on the bench to talk with my friends. While we were talking, we usually scouts good plays and celebrate when someone does a great play against the defenders and cheered them. The emotions of cheering somehow feels remarkably the same as if someone was there playing, waking up from that dream feels so surreal and I was immediately reminded that I need to rush to go to work...
Those friends who still lived inside my head and those moments of cherishing a shared celebration even if its a no-competition match, still burns inside my head. I suddenly reminded that after all those countless hundreds of days playing football ever since elementary school, not even once that I ever thought that any of those matches will be the last time I would ever play with them ever again. It never occurs to me. Everyone even close to the days of graduation, were shrugging it off simply and say "Surely, we will play again." While truth to the matter of fact is, we didn't. Most of the good friends I've made, I have never talked to them ever again and it has been years. I'm not particularly sad about it (of the fact) now. As I grow older, the re-occuring patterns of friendship and good-byes just seems natural to me and I hardly ever think about it. But one thing for sure is that had I known it'll be the very last time I get the chance to cherish the last match, I'll cherish it even more happily.
I am still until today, still meeting new friends and parting ways as I enroll in new companies and leave them after a while, then I'll meet new friends in the new workplace again. One of the few moments in my life where I get the chance to meet a lot of good friends in a very short period of time is my recent internship overseas. The period where I kind of started writing very extensively, the most extensive I've ever been at writing.
When I was writing the blip at 24th December of 2023, It just came to me that I barely remember anytihing. Years feel like days, everything goes by so fast and it has come for the last thing for all the beautiful things and beautiful people I've met. Some cheers on my writing and actually thinks that I'm a good writer, some even said that my writings are very fucking good...
It was also the period when I got obsessed on the concept of the self and the mind. There's a lot of articles dedicated for that topic, to quote the self:
What is the self exactly? Is it YOU? Is it the mind, or the mind is experiencing YOU?
Questions like these are what entertains me. What happens to the mind after you die? Will you just go poof as your biological brain can’t no longer sustain a conscious thought, or do your mind go somewhere to some incomprehensible dimension that we are unable to see and feel as of now. The first part is what atheists think and the second part is what theists think. I am more of a middle ground where I couldn’t find a good religion that fits with my personal principles yet I wanted to believe that the mind goes somewhere outside somewhere departed from its biological counterparts. But that wouldn’t really make sense does it? At least for the scientists.
This was also the time where I experienced a great existential dread regarding everything, especially my falling outlook on the philosophy or life that my religion growing up heavily speaks of. It snowballs each and every day and The Dementia was written at Jan 15th 2024.
One simple question would be, how come your sense of life and everything you ought to know, is heavily limited by certain parts in your brain that can be obstructed and your idea of reality will easily shatters? Even the ability to recognize faces are incredibly supported by just a small part of the brain and if it gets obstructed you will no longer be able to familiarize and differentiate different faces.
I was so-- out of the sudden-- be so in depth on obsessing what is the meaning of all of this when I know there's a really high probability that my religion is not right, it isn't the truth, its just what people /chooses/ to believe. Believing in something doesnt necesarilly makes it true, it's just wishful thinking.
My very first initial philosophy that I tried to 'make' was that 'everybody is a time worshipper, an experience worshipper, they just want more time to do more things with their time. If people want to say that god is everywhere, then what they are really worshipping is just time, its relative and its pretty much (debatedly and relatively speaking) is everywhere.' Then I realize that even if religion debatedly 'gives' life a purpose, I don't really think when people do good, it is because they believe there's an angel or god observing each and every of their moves that they are doing good because of such fact. What if people are simply capable of doing good just for the sake of doing good? Just because they are simply happy when they see other people is happy because of what they did? Not because there's god watching over them.
I talked to my very good friend (and to anonomyize, lets call his initial, E) about this. He is very assured and I remember to quote him harshly, "Yeah dude, no one thinks about god and the afterlife every day, even your parents, they dont nourish you or care for you because they are afraid of what happens after they die they could go to hell or heaven, they and everyone plans in life for a relatively short timespan like years ahead or 10 years ahead." Even if its just his opinion, I respect highly his opinion that there's a good grain of truth to it.
I even spoke to some of my friends about this, specifically the existence of mirror neurons that in a sense is activated the same way to us when we observe someone is performing and act.
Mirror neurons are a class of neuron that modulate their activity both when an individual executes a specific motor act and when they observe the same or similar act performed by another individual.
I even still remember V said, 'Yeah that makes a lot of sense now, when I do gymnastics, when I see other people do it before me, I can do the same thing after.' It's a very interesting piece of science.
Even if mirror neurons are limited to what it specifies 'motor act', i still believe there's a part of neurons firing in such a way we define them in terms of linguistic to feel empathy, in a sense that we are able to be happy when we see other people is happy.
The Last Thing.
The point of this article being written is to share a message. The friends you've made, the moments in life no matter how mundane it seems, there will always come a time when it'll be the last time you'd ever do it, as there'll be a last time for everything and the last thing you'll ever do anything is the time you'll die. There's this simple hack to somehow just through a simple change of frame to change the mundaneness of anything--by remembering that "this time could be the last time I'd ever do this"
And there'll come a time when it'll just become a burning memory or even nothing at all or hard to remember until it appears in your dreams.