I look forward to the day when we will have exhausted every possibility in the realm of ideas. Having no impetus for action—that animal instinct engendered by anxiety and the need for movement—we will simply cease to stir. No longer sustained by any pretense of the possible, we will discard our faith in progress and turn to sloth instead.
Enlightened creatures of the ineffectual, we will then cast off our gods as inferior to our cause. After all, they are officious and petty gods who were incapable of rising above their need to create. They craved a certain perpetual motion of the species, and so contrived our existence to satisfy themselves.
In time we will develop an asceticism of ambiguity to protest the cosmic misdeed of our creators. Our new religion, relying at first on the collective cry of "no," will climax in a doubt that paralyzes us. Wallowing in a semblance of potentiality in which everything is possible and yet nothing really is, we will finally grasp the beauty of atrophy and the sublimity of sleep.
It is quite astonishing, really, when one looks around at those who will do anything—anything at all—to stave off ennui. But in running away from one monster, we run instead toward another—one even more efficient in extinguishing us. The symptoms of our disease—war, poverty, discrimination in every form—are nothing more than the ill effects of motion, a gift from our benefactors, those divine engineers of a flawed species.
We cling to our hopes and choose to effect them with movement. But instead of our constant fits—those affronting and inefficient uses of the calorie—what if we chose to do nothing? As a species, could we handle the outcome? No thirst for power. No need to deliberate or even speak. No search for meaning in Walmart.
And in our state of collective inertia, the act of procreation would cease. What would be the point of propagating an inanimate species? In the supreme reversal of roles, only the stillborn would matter.
Deriving meaning from movement, human beings would lose their footing in a world devoid of instances. Overcome by the mere need to breathe, the race might even manage to suffocate itself at the endpoint of its fatigue. The gods would look down on their handiwork, those wretched beings convulsing for lack of air, for lack of anything.
It would be a suicide for the ages, the culmination of a protest beginning in despair and ending in silence. How fortunate we would be to experience the end of history through the act of asphyxiation—suffocation of the species—the only event in which we would be lucky enough to annihilate ourselves in torpor.
Enlightened creatures of the ineffectual, we will then cast off our gods as inferior to our cause. After all, they are officious and petty gods who were incapable of rising above their need to create. They craved a certain perpetual motion of the species, and so contrived our existence to satisfy themselves.
In time we will develop an asceticism of ambiguity to protest the cosmic misdeed of our creators. Our new religion, relying at first on the collective cry of "no," will climax in a doubt that paralyzes us. Wallowing in a semblance of potentiality in which everything is possible and yet nothing really is, we will finally grasp the beauty of atrophy and the sublimity of sleep.
It is quite astonishing, really, when one looks around at those who will do anything—anything at all—to stave off ennui. But in running away from one monster, we run instead toward another—one even more efficient in extinguishing us. The symptoms of our disease—war, poverty, discrimination in every form—are nothing more than the ill effects of motion, a gift from our benefactors, those divine engineers of a flawed species.
We cling to our hopes and choose to effect them with movement. But instead of our constant fits—those affronting and inefficient uses of the calorie—what if we chose to do nothing? As a species, could we handle the outcome? No thirst for power. No need to deliberate or even speak. No search for meaning in Walmart.
And in our state of collective inertia, the act of procreation would cease. What would be the point of propagating an inanimate species? In the supreme reversal of roles, only the stillborn would matter.
Deriving meaning from movement, human beings would lose their footing in a world devoid of instances. Overcome by the mere need to breathe, the race might even manage to suffocate itself at the endpoint of its fatigue. The gods would look down on their handiwork, those wretched beings convulsing for lack of air, for lack of anything.
It would be a suicide for the ages, the culmination of a protest beginning in despair and ending in silence. How fortunate we would be to experience the end of history through the act of asphyxiation—suffocation of the species—the only event in which we would be lucky enough to annihilate ourselves in torpor.
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