Rambles: Unpredictable Future (that merciless bitch)

I started this blog with no real intention of ever posting anything, but at the moment, all my friends are busy, I've read articles, watched YouTube videos, and studied for hours, and I figured I should write something. So I'll write about something that's been on my mind for about a week now: unpredictable future.
This is something I had already been thinking about when I stumbled upon a YouTube video by young adult novelist John Green.

Firstly, let me tell you everything that was on my mind before I watched this video. I had been thinking about this widespread process of desensitizing that seems to be affecting our species such that as time goes on, we're becoming more and more apathetic. In my head, we seem to be splitting off into groups that have enhanced senses of moral obligation, and (much larger) groups that have deteriorating senses of moral obligation (like I said, becoming more and more apathetic).

This was the initial thought that I started off with. Over the next few days, this thought branched out and I began thinking about apathy in all sorts of situations. I thought about everything from (as ridiculous as it sounds) the sort of principles my future children will develop, to the decline in religious tolerance in some parts of the world, to the rise in religious tolerance in other parts. I thought about the ugliness our species can display through events such as the Sialkot killings, and I thought about the beauty of some of our actions in events such as the rescue of the Chilean miners.

I'm scared to death of the world where cultures split off into extremes, leaving no middle ground. I don't think I want to live in a world where on one side of the globe, there is no distinction between strangers, friends, and lovers, and on the other side, the only means of survival is to stay within a horrifying network of boundaries that makes you doubtful of whether or not you want to survive at all. I don't wish for my future children to grow up thinking that kisses mean next to nothing, and that the experience of sex can be shared with just about anything that has a suitably sized cavity or protrusion (forgive the imagery) just as much as I don't wish for them to have to conform to an arbitrary set of principles that frankly don't make a hell of a lot of sense.

But apart from all this paranoia, I can in fact look to the future with something that can be described as optimism, but I'll talk about that a little later.

First, some comic relief:

If you haven't watched the video, watch it now.

So John Green talks about how none of us can be sure of what lies ahead, and he uses Walter Manlove's headstone to illustrate this, and he goes on about how we tend to latch onto the present without any real idea of how our lives will change as time goes on. But, I feel like he missed something big - he didn't seem to recognise that we aren't always so oblivious to the fickle nature of life. Sometimes, our actions are determined by this capriciousness, so what makes the idea of unpredictable future so much darker is not only that we try to predict it, but that we often try to predict it out of desperation. To me, Walter Manlove's headstone is not so much a promise from his wife, but rather an expression of her wishful thinking.

We know that life doesn't usually work in the romantic ways that we would like it to. Yet, we still etch our names into our lovers' headstones, hoping that just this once, things will be different. And it is that thought that has been getting to me. How many of our everyday thoughts are instances of wishful thinking?

I guess I'll talk more about that some other time. If you're wondering about Gussie Audrey (Walter Manlove's wife), they went ahead and uncovered her story.