L'absent
À ma manière 🪦
- Aug 18, 2024
- 1,373
We live immersed in a reality that seems solid, continuous, and persistent. Every day we wake up, and the world is still there, the people around us exist, our thoughts flow uninterrupted, as if everything were eternal. But it's just an illusion. We know that one day everything will vanish. Not only us but our very perception of reality. Our consciousness, which now feels like the center of the universe, will extinguish like a flame in the void, and the world will continue for a while—until it, too, ceases to be.
Why does everything seem so incredibly real? Because our mind is a narrative illusion. It constructs time, continuity, and meaning. Without this illusion, we would go mad. Biology has programmed us to believe that this existence is solid and meaningful because, without this deception, we couldn't survive. Reality itself is a collective hypnosis, a mental structure that allows us to function. Every emotion, every fear, every desire is just a trick pushing us forward, because our brain is a device designed to create the sensation of existence, yet it cannot conceive its own end.
And here comes the great paradox. We can rationally accept that we will die, that our consciousness will shut down, and that nothing of us will remain. Yet, we can never truly feel this truth. When we try to imagine our own non-existence, we hit a wall. We can think about death, but we always do so while alive, with an active consciousness. It's a logical paradox: we cannot imagine nothingness because our very thought is presence. It's like a computer trying to process its own shutdown—it can't, because the moment it does, it is still running.
And yet, despite everything, we continue to worry about what will happen after we die. We think about how our loved ones will go on, what will happen in the world, the mark we will leave behind. But the truth is that all of this is completely irrelevant. Once we are gone, there will be no one left to observe events, no one left to ask questions, no one for whom it might matter. For a while, our body will still exist—but without will, without thought, without a name.
The process of decomposition is the final act of our physical existence. The liquids composing our body will begin to leak, the oxygen-deprived cells will break down, bacteria will start consuming us, transforming us into simpler substances. The water will return to the environment, the organic compounds will break down into gases like methane, ammonia, and carbon dioxide, dispersing into the air. Our skin will dry out, proteins will degrade, and even our bones, though resilient, will eventually crumble into dust. Our atoms will be reused by other life forms, by other chemical reactions, blending into the ecosystem, completely losing their original identity.
But there is no comfort even in this cycle. Because although matter transforms, nothing of us remains in the way we understand it. We are no more. And if anyone seeks solace in the idea of a continuing universe, one that recycles atoms, that generates new forms of life, the truth is even more ruthless: the universe itself is doomed to end.
The stars will burn out one by one. Matter will be consumed over time until there is no energy left to form new structures. Even the most fundamental particles will decay, and the universe will become a cold, dark wasteland. One day, even the last atom will disintegrate. There will be nothing left. No consciousness to observe it, no form to preserve it, no echo of past existence.
This is the reality we cannot bear. We live immersed in a belief in continuity because accepting absolute extinction is something our mind cannot process without breaking apart. But it does not change the fate that awaits us. Everything exists only for a brief moment and then disappears without a trace. Everything we are, everything we have loved, suffered, built, and imagined, will be no more. And there will be no one left to remember it.
