My Thoughts On War and Are We In The Worst Timeline?

So, yeah…  I am very against the idea of War.  Given the date, obviously I am talking about Russia's invasion of Ukraine.  It’s 2022.  Come on.  Fuck.  One would think we would be better, but perhaps not.

I didn’t think I would want to write about current events, but here we are.  Even my attempts to escape from Reality to some degree for the purposes of narrowing my scope are rendered meaningless in the face of the Internet.  I took some time to enjoy some of Destiny 2’s new expansion over the last few days and tried to remain blissfully ignorant, but it seems that I cannot do that with this issue.

Clearly, as a Christian, I have several stances on this, but given my evolving outlook on things I will probably deviate from the traditional language and nuances of a strict Christian explanation.  Generally speaking, as I have grown older, I see the value of being alive.  An odd thing perhaps to say, but I never said that I wasn’t odd.  There is value in being alive.  You, the individual reading this, you have value simply because you exist.  Humanity Exists, and we cannot escape that.  The question is, what are we doing with our Existence?  There are endless debates on this, but I will try to sum up my philosophy on this matter. 

We are all born to this world; we didn’t choose this we just are.  From a single cell we are born and from that single cell we become a human being with the capacity to reason, think, feel, love, and evolve.  We are all on a journey and we must tell our own story.  We all have different starting points and different levels of development on a near infinite scale.  There are countless metrics upon which a human can be categorized.  None of that matters though, really.  What matters to me is what do we do with the time we have?  The ultimate question that one must figure out for themselves.  As we wake up to the Reality that we exist and we are fully alive, a choice is presented.  We must choose our journey and the story we leave behind is a tale of persevering in the face of adversity or to taking solace in complacency.  However, for the humans that have become aware of their existence, we cannot look back. The Forbidden Knowledge is ours; it cannot be unthought.  We are compelled to move forward somehow, spurred on by the concept that we must do something.  What that something is, again, is the ultimate question.  The point, in my opinion, of Existence is solving the puzzle and growing so powerful in the pursuit of this that a person becomes fully themselves as God intended.  Which is very Stoic, I suppose.  The journey being the way, the adversity being the way. 

Life is not perfect, and we do not live in a perfect Plane of Existence.  We live on planet Earth, and it is a wonderful and terrifying place.  Inevitably, Death will come for us all.  What happens after that, I leave up for debate, though I hope for Heaven.  There is this fatalistic outlook that is sort of out of place in Christianity; it is the outlook that as Christians our lives are infinite, so this finite life does not matter.  I strongly disagree with that shade of the discussion.  Why did Jesus become human in our Christian Theology if being alive didn’t matter?  Jesus came to show us how to live, not how to die.  We are not meant to simply wait to die, we are called to live.  Yes, our lives do have an end but until that happens, we have Free Will for a reason.   That is to do the something we are supposed to do.  Again, this is not an easy task to accomplish, especially if one (like me some degree) does not really know what their task is to accomplish.  However, we have our whole lives to figure that out.  Life before Death is always a ticking watch, always ticking with an unknowable end to the winding.  Terrifying and exhilarating at the same time.  Can we discover our purpose and live gloriously?  Can we devour the time we have voraciously and truly reach for Transcendence before our end comes and we see God?  How lovely it would be, as small as we are, with our finite potential to reach as high as we can? 

War though.  War cuts that journey short.  War doesn’t care about any of the things that I just said.  War is a devouring predator that cares nothing for the population of the prey that it needs to sustain itself.  War will destroy us all.  War destroys the watches of our human lives; cuts short the natural winding of our finite time.  War will destroy the potential of all.  War is the Devil in our story, the Devil that wants us to not reach the highest heights that we can rise to.  How can we as humans grow and evolve if we are dead?  How can a person live to the fullest if their fate was determined by a couple individuals in a Government that decided that they want blood and destruction?  They always send the poor, it seems.  It is truly an abhorrent thought that people with their own stories will be sent against or at other people that also have stories.  Basically, a binary outcome must be determined among the outcomes of whose story continues and whose must end.  Who can say whose story was more important?  I cannot say, I am not God.  I do not have time, space, and reality itself as my domain in all time for all time.  I am just an Engineer that thinks too much.  However, given that no mortal can say whose story is more important makes it seem to me that we shouldn’t make this choice for others.  I would have us be the characters in each other’s story that share in the adventure and eventually drink to each other’s success at the final chapter of our lives rather than being the reason that a story ends. 

In this world of connectedness, I have a metal band that I love from Russia, The End of Melancholy.  Their social media is full with words of protest against the Russian Government going to war.  According to Olly, it seems that Russia’s citizens are not happy about this, but they can’t do anything.  A Hell that I am spared from for now.  Another metal/whatever they want the band to be, Jinjer from Ukraine, posted a video informing the world (or at least their followers) that they are for the moment as safe as they can be.  However, how safe can anyone be in War?  Eugene spoke of the children being afraid and the tone of the video was not hopeful.  The video was short but to the point, and it spoke to me and even now as I write this, I am deeply saddened and horrified. 

Some happy songs played on my playlist as I write this, but I felt the urge to skip them.  Ironically, the point of these songs on my playlist is to inject fun into the playlist because it was originally supposed to be a tool to bring me Joy, but it turned into Existentialism as a lot of things do with me.  Seems that the playlist is just rolling along with the good vibes that I need but good vibes are hard when you don’t feel in a good vibes mood.  I’ll post a link to the playlist on my Blog Website one day.  For now, my energy is spent today in writing this late into the evening as I am inspired to do so despite (or perhaps because of) my tears. 

But, I digress.  I must not give into Nihilism as I do not think that it is a good way to live well.  However.  Perhaps this is the dawn of the End of the World.  Seems that the jokingly but not jokingly foretold WWIII may occur.  Hopefully not but it seems that the citizens of the World are wholly at the whims of their Government.  I truly give thanks to God that we do not have President Trump in office at this time; the only blessing I can think of at this moment regarding this issue of War.  I have truly lost track of all the catastrophes of the past several years.  Seems the world is ending all the time.  One could maybe make the case that the world was always ending but now with social media and the Internet we have access to more information.  I think about the meme about Millennials from the Witcher where Geralt says, “I've lived through a whole dark age and three supposed end of days. It's all horseshit.”  I am starting to wonder though.  I wonder if it will be ok.  Thirty-One years is not very much time on average for a human lifespan but a lot sure has happened in my life. 

I was playing Pathfinder the other night and that was when the news that Russia had starting fucking bombing Ukraine broke.  One of my friends said that he really does wonder if we are living in the worst timeline.  Lighthearted Millennial morbid debate broke out about whether that is true.  The joke was that we are in the worst timeline because we keep having reason to hope only to continually live in a perpetual state of being hopeful.  We wait for things to get better but they never do.  It would perhaps be better for the world to end so we can just have a stable reality of, “Well, hey, apocalypse, huh?” rather than this Purgatory of Hope. 

I pondered this further, as I do, and I thought, “Well, what does it mean if we are in the worst timeline?  What would it look like if we interacted with other timelines?” 

The answer I came to is if we are in the worst timeline, then we are the most resilient humans.  How else could we exist if we were not?  It’s the worst and still, here we are, still being human and still trying to Transcend.  And I find that encouraging.