26. 01.
One question keeps haunting me again and again recently: Why do we care about our future so much? Why are we frightened of our eventual death so much that we even make up religions just to escape the concept of end?
If someone came to me, told me he owns a time machine, and gave me an opportunity to choose whether he should rather torture the Me from previous or following week I wouldn´t think for long and clearly pick the past one. Even though it is as close to my present Me as the future one and it would feel as much of suffering as the future one would. I simply care about my future Me much more.
If I went even further into the past I would probably lose any connection with the younger version of Me whatsover. When someone is telling me what I did when I was 18, 15, 10 or even 4 years old - I don´t really care much. It´s sometimes interesting and funny but I don´t feel any strong relation to that guy from past. I don´t understand him, I don´t particularly care about him. Whatever has happenned to him, I don´t really feel great happiness or sorrow as long as it´s not affecting Me in now. Heck, I can even imagine I would detest him if my present Me somehow managed to meet him (yeah, those story-tellers are usually very keen on telling the most embarrassing parts of his life).
Who is Me in the first place?
Bertrand Russell in some book (either Our Knowledge of the External World or Why I Am Not a Christian) argues that the whole idea of Me is false. As far as we know, there is nothing about humans which cannot be explained in physical manner, there is no out-of-this-world substance, no immaterial soul which would justify the concept of persistent Me. Hence when I say Me it´s a merely linguistic shortcut, man-made term denoting an entity which moves continuously through the space and time keeping some level of molecular and structural integrity and similarity. Apart from that the only thing which remains exactly the same is probably the DNA information. But is that really enough to justify the strong feeling of “identity”, the definition of an individual?
I´m sure both phenomena - the strong feeling of personal identity and the preference of future - can be explained by some evolutionary psychology, both might be an “advantage” leading to higher survival rate of the affected living beings. However, it disturbs me how significantly it influences our lives, how it shapes our happiness. If we weren´t so captured by the idea of future life (and after-life), we might have much better life in every single point of the actual present life. And we might not need to create the complicated doctrinal “moral” systems which under the promise of a better future (heaven, yeeeah!!!) manage to blind our reason, common sense and personal judgement. But might we have been extinct now?
Meta-babbling
So I have the doubts. Should I try to escape this scheme, throw the future overboard and never again be depressed remembering The Hundred Years of Solitude (OMG I gonna die, OMG we all gonna die, OMG I´m so alone!!!)? When other people rather choose religion, is it justifiable to be annoyed and distressed? And have I just proven an enormous obsession by future when my present Me wastes so much time by these likely nowhere-leading meta thoughts? Well, everything is good enough if it offers an excuse not to study the econometric panel data models, I guess.
OT: I haven´t updated my blog since April (actually my past Me has´t, I blame him). Although I would like to revive it, I don´t give my future Me much chances. After a couple of years of frequent writing I became a bit tired of it. I also don´t feel I really have much of original stuff to share and Facebook/Twitter pretty much satisfy my need of idea sharing and discussing. Foremost, I´m currently more than busy and blogging is not the relaxation activity of first choice. Yeah and one more thing: I don´t expect you to correct my grammar mistakes, I´m really not interested in that sort of comments here. I´m fully aware of my linguistic “talent” myself. 
Tags: bertrand russell, evolution, future, life, morality, philosophy, religion, time
David Antoš
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