Every new thing means the end of some old thing. Perhaps many old things. I’m haunted by this fact.

It’s so easy—for some people—to focus on what matters to them. To the exclusion of all else. If nobody cares, why does it matter? It’s a strange assumption. It’s consistent, though. Humans are arrogant. They have great certainty of the importance of their own opinions.

This arrogance is both feature and bug. When humanity was young, and weak, it helped give us the strength to survive. All animals act as if they are important. It is the successful effort to survive which enables survival.

But now that we are strong, our arrogance becomes increasingly self-defeating. What dies so that we may live? What suffers so that we may prosper? Increasingly, everything else suffers. Everything else dies. And in time, we will learn that what we didn’t care about was very important. It’s absence will ensure our destruction, and there will be no one remaining to note our foolishness. Perhaps it will be the last thought of the last person to pass away, final victim of a ridiculous farce.

In the meantime, I am a person with too much time on his hands, victim of a tragic hesitation. Not to compare myself to a tragic Danish prince, but maybe I understand that play just a little better. Choices have consequences. Not just the chance of success or the risk of failure, but the secondary implications, which we cannot know, cannot predict. Will those unexpected consequences make us regret our actions? Or will we dismiss them as irrelevant? What if they lead to our destruction? Or the destruction of something else?

The response is, “Change is inevitable! Destruction is inevitable!” Yes, I know. I cannot be responsible for the dynamic nature of the universe, or the transient nature of its forms. Shapes evolve, appear, and disappear. We live in a world of fleeting apparitions. We must be resigned to transience, to loss, including of ourselves. It is our role to instigate change, to bring death and destruction, whether we like it or not. Our lives requires the sacrifice of other lives. Other lives depend on our deaths.

I’m not sure that I care about my own death. I question whether my life is worth so much sacrifice. There is no objective measure. All value systems are contrived. My own is unable to justify itself, to rationalize. Though it is no less strong. I am well defended. But not perfectly. No more than any. In the end, I live by the whim of fate, the accident of chance. Yet I am not powerless, nor blameless. Others—mostly animals and plants—so that I may live. It is, most would say, my right to survive, so long as I obey the laws of my nation, and perhaps some vague informal morality.

My own survival is a trivial occupation. The question is what to do with all this extra time. To what should I devote myself? Myself? Or others? Or if not people, then ideas? Knowledge? Art? Truth? Beauty? Fun? Pleasure? Nature?

Everything that lives implies the death of something else. What shoud I kill, so that something else might survive a little longer?