this is gonna be strange, but one of the things that make me sad about death is the fact that everything tries fighting so hard to keep me alive dies too.
But chin up - the reason it was so sad to watch is because of the joy that life itself brings us. Don't forget to enjoy your life and your happiness today!
I think the sadness is somehow even greater because it may not have a brain, consciousness, or any understanding that it’s dying at all.
There’s no fear of what’s coming, no acceptance, no story it tells itself about what’s happening. It simply existed, sustained itself for a while, and then slowly couldn’t anymore.
Maybe that’s why watching something so tiny and simple wither away hits so strangely hard. We’re not necessarily grieving its suffering we’re recognizing the universality of impermanence. No matter the size or complexity, everything living seems bound by that same fundamental rule.
And maybe that says something interesting about empathy too. We can feel sadness for something that may never have been capable of feeling sadness itself. It doesn’t have to understand its own mortality for us to recognize ourselves in it.
And there’s something deeply human about feeling sad for a creature that may never have been capable of feeling sadness itself.
In the end no matter what, us biological creatures no matter how different we are, how intelligent, PREDATOR or PREY, we end up at the same destination as brothers and sisters
If you are a simple dividing cell, consider that there is no distinction between parent and offspring. Each can consider themselves to be a continuously living being first born at the primordial conception of life on earth.
Similarly, your life began when egg in your mothers womb started dividing and divided enough times that cells began differentiating and formed a fully formed human being. That egg cell doesn’t “die” in this process, it just divides. That egg was formed very early in your mothers development, while she was still in her mothers womb, and similarly by process of cells dividing.
We can all trace our lives back along a lineage of dividing cells that have necessarily not died and go all the way back to first cell division. The life inside of you is very old and doesn’t necessarily die with you.
I heard this in a different form years and years ago: the fact that you are standing here today means there is an unbroken lineage behind you stretching back to life’s beginning.
We are truly stardust, for all of the heavier elements we are made of: the carbon, nitrogen, iron, and the other metals, came from the exploded cores of dead stars ...
I also look at this way: all the building blocks of the universe that would become everything in it were present at the very beginning. Although we ourselves are not that old, the quarks and whatever other fundamental particles may be eventually found that we are made from, are 13 billion years old.
So, in a sense, we are both new and have been here 13 billion years...
I’ll never forget being in Sunday school and they’re teaching us about the flood and how god said he wouldn’t do that again and my one buddy goes “but what about fire?” and the teacher just goes “that revelations, you’ll learn that later” hahaha
“Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything
I enlisted and wanted to do my time before becoming a parent. Now that I'm out, this economy is absolute garbage. If I gain responsibility of a child, I'll do my best, but I am okay if that day is far from now.
no, but those original cells are our ancestors and every single living thing, from the tiniest microbe to the largest multicellular organism, comes from them. life is a never-ending cycle. even if our ancestors are dead, they "live on" because they were the first creatures to emerge from the primordial soup as life, who started the cycle.
in addition, the atoms and chemical compounds that form us, humans, and every other living thing on earth, may well have been part of one of the first living beings in the world at some point. while those first living beings (the cells in question) are now dead, little pieces of them certainly live on in some form.
This is why I don’t get why people don’t want kids. Essentially the fact that you are on this earth today is because your ancestors kept that line going - back to the origin of life essentially. Yet you would want to effectively bring that to en an end by not passing on your genes. That’s literally crazy to me.
I try to explain this to my mother but she still insists that I should give her grandchildren. I just shout "ITS ALL YOUR FAULT FOR BEING SUCH AN AMAZING PARENT! I CANT LIVE UP TO THAT! YOU SHOULD BE GRATEFUL THAT I HAVE A LIZARD!"
The lizard will be her only grandchild and I spoil him as such.
"Similarly, your life began when egg in your mothers womb started dividing and divided enough times that cells began differentiating and formed a fully formed human being."
Yeah, there’s something that brought about the beginning of the process of division. It doesn’t just “happen”. There is the small bit called fertilization. Otherwise this was a beautiful concept.
It was a microorganism called Blepharisma musculus, which have a pink pigment that oxidizes quickly in light. The light from the microscope caused the pigment to oxidize, and it essentially melted to death from the heat of the chemical reaction
appreciate the explanation. my biology knowledge is weak.
but looking it up i learned these creatures can grow to relatively enormous size by *CANNIBALISM*!
What???
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u/VariousAd2521 16d ago
See you on the other side my friend