In his book 1Q84, Haruki Murakami writes that everyone, deep in their hearts, is waiting for the end of the world to come. Well, I don't know about everyone, but I certainly am waiting for it.
Desire to not exist is not the desire to kill oneself, not even some version of "I will not initiate it myself, but if something that is quick and painless is to come, then I am happy about it." But the wish of never having been born in the first place.
To go to sleep and not wake up, not “not wake up” as if you died in your sleep, but wishing that there was no night in which you went to sleep in order to wake up. Desire to simply get plucked out of existence.
The only realistic solution for such violent desire is the end of the world. Though the former means not existing and all other people not noticing your absence. And the latter means eliminating all observers. But both events make the desire come true, though the cost and method is obviously different.
Now this mentality, that if I hadn’t been born, then I wouldn’t have suffered, isn't new. Some say it’s a sign of a victim mindset, of cowardice, of selfishness. And so is the wait for the end of the world.
When we are wishing for these events, we are not taking everyone’s lives into account. This day, no matter how bad for us, is the best day of their life for millions of people. And thousands of them are going to speak, literally in their language, these words. “I am so happy I was born. This is the best day ever.”
Now this begs some questions: Is my feeling invalid, because there are people on the opposite spectrum of what I feel right now? Can I not even make a wish to cope with my pain? Do I have to always take 8 billion people and their lives into account before having a single thought?
Of course, you don't. But if you truly want this desire to come true, logically you are summoning the end of the world. Because you cannot just not exist now, you cannot prevent your birthing, so the only solution is the end of the world, and the world can end, it has ended several times. And we have even created some really great candidates for this event.
And it’s alright. It's totally okay. It doesn't mean you are evil or selfish. You can desire anything with as much heart as possible. You don't have to take anything into account.
You can believe otherwise, but it looks like the Universe has no purpose, no obligation towards us, or towards any star or planet. Life was not meant to exist, because nothing was meant to exist. Everything exists without reason, randomly. It won’t be against any rule, any Universal doctrine, any God, for stars to form, for stars to die, for creatures like us to evolve, for creatures like us to fight with one another over our self imagined importance. And the Universe does not care about our lives, our words, our description, our prayers, because the Universe is not listening for any feedback. It’s lifeless, it’s a void.
And of course, you know this all. The world matters because it matters to us. Only for us. For example the reason we should fight climate change and have it under control, is because it will make our life easier. It’s not like Earth has any wish to have solid ice and lower temperature. It has been a ball of fire more than it has been this green and blue place. It doesn’t want any life to harbour it. It doesn’t care. It cannot care.
People die. Maybe thousands because of war or food poisoning. Water poisoning may kill hundreds of thousands. Some diseases may kill millions. But the whole world cannot end easily, and in a desirable way. The usual candidates are nuclear war and asteroid impact. But the nuclear war wouldn’t be instant, people would know a missile is on their way and they would die within an hour. So these 60 minutes are painful. Eliminating this reaction time, this anticipation would be the best. The same with asteroid impact. We would know and anticipate for days, for even months and years. And the same is with scifi stuff such as a stable black hole in a lab that will keep growing. We would know. We would feel it. We need something quick, something that cannot be detected and anticipated, something that won’t make us sad, something painless.
My favourite candidate is Gamma Ray Bursts. We cannot detect it. Or, detecting it means getting hit. Because it is a huge beam of high energy photons, and so it can travel at the speed of light. If it’s big, it won't even take one whole second to penetrate and burn everything on Earth. Yes, that quick. Imagine the total energy that the Sun could generate in its whole lifetime. These bursts release all that energy in a second. And these rays can last from a few milliseconds to a few hours.
We first knew about these rays when a military satellite was hit in space by a very, very little amount in 1967, during the cold war.
There is also a hypothesis that Gamma Ray Bursts did hit Earth once, 445 million years ago, an extinction called “Late Ordovician mass extinction,” which wiped 85% marine lives, an event more powerful than the one that killed dinosaurs.
But they are considered very very rare, in fact one per galaxy per a million years, but again, who knows? Detecting is getting hit. There is no guarantee for these beams to not be on their way towards us from some distant galaxy.
It could come right now. As you read these words. Maybe in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Ohh okay we are still safe.
But the more the end of the world doesn’t happen, the more one might get angrier. The desire to not exist increases as the time of existence increases.
