Musings

If asked to characterized my current mental state:

(and no, that's never happened before. I digress.)

I would say (1) general apprehension, and (2) soaking in a kind of hopelessness only a complete belief in fatalism would bring.

Fatalism is about the worst thing in the world. Seriously. I remember first discovering the concept, in high school. I was different then. Things came easier. I was more religious. I thought it silly. I mean, obviously, if I'm making decisions, fate doesn't control everything.

Then came college. Upheaval. Moving from home. New outlook. Camus. Scientific education. An endless litany of stimulus/response. Reproducible results, down to the nearest mL. To know the input is to know the output. No mysteries. The heavens boiled down to a drop.

Fatalism is really science writ large. The human become automaton. You don't decide, you respond. It's Bill Murray's Groundhog Day. If the same day happened over and over again, you would respond the same way to the same stimulus. Perhaps we experience the sensation of choice, but that's it. Really, you're preprogrammed, college/career/marriage set in stone from the moment of conception. Really, before that. Nothing could be done.

But if there's no choice, there's no hope. There's no change. There's no future. The present is just one spot on an uninterrupted whole, the past and future existing in all moments. You, he, she, it, all truly powerless to effect change. Sure, it's depressing, but it was bound to happen. Everything was bound to happen.

Anyway, fatalism as a concept is strangely convincing to the scientist, while I think any artist would quickly cut through the sophistry. You can't disprove fatalism. But you can't prove it either. Choice or no choice, the system is consistent. If you can't prove it either way, so why not live with choice?

And that's how I left it. But sometimes I slip back. It's bound to happen, you know.