Scattered

The thing to remember is that we all start out in pieces; your parents give you a few, your culture gives you a bunch, but most of them will come with the experiences of life. This is the sense in which we both make and discover ourselves, for it is in seeking formative experiences that we find new things about ourselves; we discover tastes, and skills, and fears, and using all these decide where to go next.

And yet with each such decision, we sentence uncountable others we might have been to death by exclusion. What we seek out for ourselves will change as we find more or less than we sought, and rarely are we permitted even a glimpse at how things might have gone otherwise, let alone a visit; your tastes will change, passions will grow muted or cynical, and sooner or later you lose the chance to want badly enough all those great things you once did. If this endgame is to be prepared for, it must be by moderating our decisions, for it is the person we build through them that we will ultimately be, and this isn't necessarily someone who'll enjoy the retirement we're planning for ourselves now; decrepit retirees endup littering beaches because that's where they dreamed of going when they were still young enough to enjoy it.

What is needed then is a metric, a standard according to which we can live our lives creatively and fruitfully without becoming mired in the leftovers of our bad decisions. And indeed, such is an oft-repeated theme in the popular religions: that, through one mechanism or another, our actions will come back to haunt us. That what we do really matters, ultimately and specifically, to ourselves and our own fates.

And yet in eight millennia of accumulated culture, no such metric has gained any popularity without being distorted for other social purposes, made just another tool for interpersonal conflict. Something in humans, something that sings oh-so-sweetly when we conquer a foe or eat fried chicken, keeps us pulling back from these revelations about the importance of our choices.

And perhaps it will, in the end, come to nothing less comical than that a species of primate learned to direct its own evolution through culture, and used this power to accelerate its growth beyond physical limits; that is, to death.