Darkover
Archangel
- Jul 29, 2021
- 5,597
We exist in a vulnerable situation — completely exposed to all forms of harm, with no built-in protection from the environment. We are just soft tissue and fragile minds, soft and breakable, laid bare against a world entirely unconcerned with our survival.
The universe is fundamentally flawed — or perhaps indifferent — in the sense that if you were designing a reality where conscious beings could exist safely, this isn't how you'd do it. There's no ownership over the atoms that make us who we think we are. Everything is a temporary arrangement — a pile of particles on borrowed time, pretending to be "you."
The average human lifespan is just over 2.5 billion seconds — a blink, a flicker, a brief delay before disintegration. No permanence. No protection. No purpose. Everything is impermanent, unstable, decaying.
To exist, to move, to think — you must extract energy from your environment. That means taking, consuming, breaking something else down just to keep yourself going. To power your body, to maintain your form, to continue having thoughts — you must destroy something else.
This isn't optional. It's the price of being alive.
Existence is a constant transaction of theft and transformation. A cycle of consumption and decay. The continuation of your form depends on the destruction of another.
And despite this cost, we have no defenses worth the name. Unlike other organisms, humans don't come with armor — no shell, no thick fur, no natural camouflage. We are exposed to extremes of temperature, weather, predators, accidents. Our skin, our first and only real barrier, is thin, porous, and easily damaged. We are a delicate scaffold of proteins and nerves, placed in a world that never stops attacking.
Our immune systems fight tirelessly, but they're always on the edge of failure. A single mutated cell, an airborne virus, a cut on the wrong surface — and the machinery begins to collapse. Every time we breathe, eat, or touch, we risk inviting destruction inside.
From a biological standpoint, failure is inevitable. Cells degrade. Tissues weaken. Damage accumulates. The body declines and breaks, not as an anomaly, but as a certainty. Any moment could be the one when something goes wrong — a clot, a rupture, a replication error, a terminal silence in the heart or brain.
And beneath all of this — the bodily vulnerability, the environmental danger, the relentless need to take — there is no cosmic caretaker, no benevolent architect. There is only the indifferent hum of entropy, carving everything down to dust.
The universe is fundamentally flawed — or perhaps indifferent — in the sense that if you were designing a reality where conscious beings could exist safely, this isn't how you'd do it. There's no ownership over the atoms that make us who we think we are. Everything is a temporary arrangement — a pile of particles on borrowed time, pretending to be "you."
The average human lifespan is just over 2.5 billion seconds — a blink, a flicker, a brief delay before disintegration. No permanence. No protection. No purpose. Everything is impermanent, unstable, decaying.
To exist, to move, to think — you must extract energy from your environment. That means taking, consuming, breaking something else down just to keep yourself going. To power your body, to maintain your form, to continue having thoughts — you must destroy something else.
This isn't optional. It's the price of being alive.
Existence is a constant transaction of theft and transformation. A cycle of consumption and decay. The continuation of your form depends on the destruction of another.
And despite this cost, we have no defenses worth the name. Unlike other organisms, humans don't come with armor — no shell, no thick fur, no natural camouflage. We are exposed to extremes of temperature, weather, predators, accidents. Our skin, our first and only real barrier, is thin, porous, and easily damaged. We are a delicate scaffold of proteins and nerves, placed in a world that never stops attacking.
Our immune systems fight tirelessly, but they're always on the edge of failure. A single mutated cell, an airborne virus, a cut on the wrong surface — and the machinery begins to collapse. Every time we breathe, eat, or touch, we risk inviting destruction inside.
From a biological standpoint, failure is inevitable. Cells degrade. Tissues weaken. Damage accumulates. The body declines and breaks, not as an anomaly, but as a certainty. Any moment could be the one when something goes wrong — a clot, a rupture, a replication error, a terminal silence in the heart or brain.
And beneath all of this — the bodily vulnerability, the environmental danger, the relentless need to take — there is no cosmic caretaker, no benevolent architect. There is only the indifferent hum of entropy, carving everything down to dust.
