18 January 2021,
You walk towards your computer after concluding your one thousand tours on your Instagram feed, you are about to lay down and give your soul to Hypnos: the Greek God of sleep, and enjoy your detachment from the world. As soon as you lay down, you start analyzing everything that happened during your day, from that ‘hi’ from the cashier that you didn’t know how to reply, to the smile from the kid you crossed in your building. You analyze Every small and big thing that happened recently, but you come across a big thought that stops you from pushing through, and it’s ‘ why do we need sleep?’. Your cellphone was there waiting, just for the smallest reason to lighten up. You keep reading throughout the sources and articles one after the other, and you end up with many answers that seem quite surprising. Sleep has never been necessary for recharging, but rather for growth and the tissue’s change. however, you find how scary it gets when your brain reaches stage 4 of sleep and you become paralyzed. That's when you remember Frank Underwood's quote "I've always loathed the necessity of sleep. Like death, it puts even the most powerful men on their backs.". now you remember death and wonder if sleep takes us to the same place death does, due to the fact that we sleep and sink into oblivion until we wake up again, so you end up looking furthermore for where sleep takes us. Eventually, you find that nobody knows where we go, it’s just blank, or rather a physical explanation: your brain shuts down, so you realize that us falling asleep is us being trained to die.
You lay back on your bed, the phone falls on the ground, and all you think about is death. We take one peak of death every day when we lay on our back, close our eyes, and go to the land of the dead, and then you remember how Hypnos has always been the brother of ‘Thanatos’ the God of death, so is that it? Do we go nowhere?
You now know that there is no chance your eyes shut and give your body some rest, so you have to get up and go for a walk at least to restore the lost energy. to that, you get up, put your coat on, and head out. As soon as you open the door, you find a homeless man lying on your doorstep. You decide to step aside without waking him up and make sure you don’t spell his food leftovers. Out of a sudden, you burst out of your thought bubble and realize that you're in a world where 7 billion people live, that you're not the only one here, and your fear of death and sleep is not the biggest problem yet isn’t death the ending of everyone and everything, more like a disaster that takes each one of us at a time, an equivalent of an asteroid that will probably diminish us one day but maybe what comforts you is the realization that life goes on after you go, you smile, look back at your loved ones, and see how happy they will be a year after you’re gone. You look back at generations of people carrying your genes, year after another you get more descendants, and out of sudden you smile at the basic idea of only after 6 generations there might be 126 people that carry your loved one's genes. That feeling of comfort rushes through you, but you remember all the bad things that might happen in the world from global warming to revolutions, wars, and disputes, and your heart starts beating so fast, as your footsteps get faster too, you get in that store where you gt a piece of candy, seeking a so said comfort.
You walk outside, sit on the floor, look at the sky and then shift your focus to your descends, and think that by the end of the century you would have 2050 people carrying your genes. you think that after that millions of you descend will have to live in a world you have no idea about, filled with God knows what disasters and the stars in the sky remind you that the universe isn’t a promise of forever: one day it will send us more and more disasters and meteors, and by the end of our galaxy, the milky Way and Andromeda will crash into each other for a big finality. our sun will evaporate every single drop of water that we didn’t waste because of our greediness only to explode into becoming a beautiful black hole. The bigger picture starts making sense’ out of all the information you walked past all these years, and now the milky way in your hand has a different meaning. you take a very deep breath, and get up to see the look on your face on the mirrored glass sticking to the store’s wall to realize that you have the same look of a little kid that just found out that people die, parents included… And oh... Wait… I am included too. and year after year, you come to make peace with death and only think about things you will miss. people you love, good weathered days, and the sweet feeling when you find a song you heard that one time in the mall.
The deeper you stare at your reflection, the more you realize that you have the same look as any nihilist who looked into the hollow meaning of life. A nihilist who stepped into the total misery of knowing that we don’t exist for a purpose, that the universe is insignificant of our existence, and no matter how loud you scream you are all alone in a vast cruel universe.
A passing luxurious car wakes you up from your deep thinking by splashing dirty water on you, caused by the rainy night and poor infrastructure. This made you realize how arrogant people can be, even if all of our existence is meaningless. instead, we should come to the middle ground, understand that life is as beautiful and sensational as it is terrifyingly horrible and hollow thus no matter how long we spend our meaningless life on earth, your milky way will always taste as good, and that prick in his car will always stay arrogant. On any side of the universe, you will end up dying and someone who loves you will look at the milky way in the store, drop a tear with a smile, miss you, and when they die someone who loves them will miss them. but maybe one day in the far future, humankind will cure cancer, fight death, look to the universe in the eyes, and of course defeat it.
Or even find a cure for this insomnia you have, however, now we don’t have the science nor the power for that, so you might as well decide to go back to your house, make some tea, hand your soul to Hypnos and face your fear of sleep just being death in disguise, realize how lucky you are belonging to the only specie in the universe who understood the absurdity of this universe, and stands everyday fighting and has so much good in it. The biggest sign for that is all the organizations in stores: the hot meal leftovers next to the homeless man, for instance, we may be imperfect, even sometimes terrifyingly horrible as much as the universe. But at the end of the day, we are just Homo-nihilis.
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