Survey from the Dead

Sometimes it feels like the idea of learning ‘lessons of life’ is pointless because you only get one chance and you can’t fill out a survey and mail it back from the dead.

But there is a certain familiar feeling to it- swimming against the infinite black tide, trying to make sense of senselessness. After all, it is part of our fundamental nature to discern patterns from noise. Even in our most nihilist incantation of being will we continue constructing models to embody our sense of meaning from the patterns we think we are experiencing. That is the brain’s higher function- metacognitive prediction, aka “to know thyself.”

Yet what would a survey from the dead even provide? As we analyze and contribute to history, we are infinitely doomed to repeat it because our particle is a wave, and we are surfing on the frequency of our existence and sustained by the heartbeat of our animal nature.

However one can come to understand that all is not lost or nil. Instead existence is a symphony of harmonies composed by mere being, and the repetition mere notes with the timbre of our personalities. So, we come to find that we are the survey and we are in post for the next recipient, reverberating along the string of time and space to interpret and embody anew.