This blog has two purposes; no, three. The first is definitely "if Anne can do it", that is, if Anne can return from the train tracks at midnight and blog, well then, so can I. The second is, I haven't blogged in several days, and I don't want to get lazy. The third, most important, reason, is that I want to make this blog about more than myself, or even my interests because, in the end, who cares?

Scott says that the main inspiration behind everything in our lives is fear of death. For me, the three main actions of life are eating, sleeping and having sex. I'm not just being cynical here; to my mind, those are the three things around which everything else in our lives are based. It's been well established that fear of death is mixed in with the sex drive, what with the desire for immortality, and for connection with another being (which reinforces our own existence). Eating's connection is also fairly apparent, as it provides us with building material (by decomposing something else, cruelly enough). Sleep is something of a concession to death.

Well, the pattern is there for most every action, conscious or unconscious. Creation and conversation are similar to the sex drive in their intentions. Appreciating music, writing, movies and such appear to me to be part of the desire for immortality; it is almost as if, subconsciously, we think that if we learn enough about the world, we will end up immortal. Someone, I forget who, said that all men believe in their own death in the same way that agnostics believe in God. (Oh, and acts of religion are so obvious as to not require elaboration.) Keeping clean is similar to eating in the desire to stave off decomposition. I can't think of many important things which don't somehow tie in with what I've already mentioned (aside from going to the bathroom, which is more of a consequence of eating than it is an action). This is a very general, but inclusive, description of all of life. And fear of death is, indeed, shown to pervade every activity.

Looking at more specific actions is perhaps pointless when examining fear of death, but another action worth observing is the process of picking which specific actions will make up our own lives. We all create individual personalities, not necessarily through conscious desire (that's just going to Hot Topic, and it doesn't work); usually it is through our unique circumstances, which cannot help but be different for each person. Our experiences are thus necessarily different, and experience plays a large role in personality. Anyway, as is obvious in modern western culture, people tend to try to assert their individualilty, their egos. It is exclusively for their own benefit, as reasserting the self can fool one into believing he isn't going to die.

Even seemingly selfless actions, like, say, saving an animal which is about to be hit by a car, can be construed as another form of fearing death. In this example, perhaps we save the animal out of a desire not to see something die, which would remind us of our fate. Interestingly, the standard western moral system places priority on selflessness if an action is to be moral. It cannot explain this without circular argument.

It is also interesting that Buddhism is an attempt to destroy the ego, which would simultaneously destroy the fear of death (if there is no "I", then it is meaningless to say that "I am going to die").

This is all just an experimental rant in an attempt to blog exclusively about an idea rather than events in my life.