Box of memories

I had to come dig this up after today.

How ironic that the day after you post this, i find myself in a neighborhood i didn’t expect or realize i’d be in… which did something to me that must have resembled, in some ways, your experience with the box.

As for the forgetting pill…

I would probably try it. I doubt it could make me forget entire people, but i would gladly erase a pile of the right (or wrong, perspective…) memories, if it would ensure i would not feel the pains (and their subsequently overwhelming disruptive capacity) associated with them again. Perhaps with less memory-torture, i’d be able to fix some things.

Idk. I’m still swimming in aftershocks, i think. My whole day has been surreal. I slept more today than i have in a while.

The memory pill… i would be conflicted about it, due to the need to forget some things (and someone) that i would rather remember. But since all i have are the memories, and all they do is hurt me, while the lessons learned can’t be applied to anything in my actual life… “the right thing to do,” would be to alleviate myself from needless suffering, and take it, and forget those things.

I can’t even watch the news these days. I honestly don’t want to know, unless it’s going to directly impact me. It’s not that i don’t care; it’s that i do care, but i don’t want to. Plus, “the news” just opens a whole can of worms i get tired of being force-fed.

I would recommend reading the article (the one i found was on ‘wired’). They intend to make it precise enough that you might still “know it happened,” but not actually remember the traumatizing parts.

But you’re right to question whether the motivation to help others would still exist, without the hardships we’ve experienced. My answer is “perhaps not.” I’m not sure we wouldn’t still want to help, nor am i sure we would. I think there is some humanist, naturalist morality at play here, in which we must understand the value of the experience of suffering, to be motivated to avoid, reduce, and possibly eliminate it, as well as how important it is for all of us to work toward that goal, for the sake of the greater good. It’s easy to inadvertently cross over from “realism” to “idealism,” on this topic.

Basically, if only some of us are working toward elimination of needless suffering, while “the rest of most people” either don’t care, or don’t get it, or even actively oppose such efforts… then is it even “worth trying?” In the face of overwhelming resistance, is “morality” even possible? Is it “useful” or “beneficial” to ourselves and the rest of the world? Or is it just an idealistic fantasy, another “false construct” through which to filter our perceptions of the world, ourselves, so that we can make things seem like what we want them to be, despite the overwhelming evidence to suggest that things are not, and will never be, the ways we wish they were?

Often, i know what i am inclined to think, but not sure what to say. There is just so much that seems should not need saying, but seems to need saying, anyway. It seems “life” is arbitrarily saturated with artificial and diversionary requirements to surpass seemingly boundless obfuscation, in order to even reach the real issues, to begin observing, evaluating, analyzing, and ultimately, crafting solutions.

Meanwhile, tick tock, days, weeks, months, years lost…

I feel like i need a group, a community, from which to organize a unified front against the problems i see… but all “those like me” seem to be sporadically scattered throughout the world, unable to come together to accomplish anything, if we can even locate each other at all.