Bleak Beauty

Love the world enough to leave it.

[bleakbeauty]

Humanity is a falling bomb, and the sum total of human goodness is the time it spends in the air.

[bleakbeauty]

[bleakbeauty]

Here's a new song: "Errant." If it matters to you, I'm a neurodivergent artist. I have clinical diagnoses of autism, NVLD, PTSD, and social anxiety disorder. I don't know what I want you to do with that information.

[bleakbeauty]

Edge of The Forest

[bleakbeauty]

Moondown

[bleakbeauty]

[bleakbeauty]

A new song: Not So Empty

[bleakbeauty]

New song: The Cynic

[bleakbeauty]

[bleakbeauty]

[bleakbeauty]

Why is it good that humans should not go extinct? If you point to the things that humans have done or can do as evidence that they must persist, then you point to things that only have value to humans themselves. Science. Medicine. Philosophy. The universe doesn't care how much they come to know about it. It isn't here for them to understand. Of course, humans don't want to go extinct, but that they should persist because they want to isn't a good answer. It makes sense that human lives matter to humans. But the crusade to ensure the indefinite continuity of the human species can only be a selfish one. If humans must endure, if their survival is non-negotiable, it is not for the universe, which doesn't need their best science. It isn't for the world, where their capacity for kindness impresses only them and which existed without them for 4 billion years. It's only for themselves. Wanting to stay alive for yourself is fine, but this admits of no assumption that we must explode human significance into a cosmic phenomenon. Humans are not here because they need to be. One day, they will not be here. In fact, one day, there will be no more planet Earth and no more solar system. If humans must stop destroying each other, it is not for the sake of the universe but for their own sake that they must do so. And if, in order to survive, they must become different animals entirely, then they won't survive, whether they make that change or not. If they were better, they wouldn't be human.

[bleakbeauty]

All you have to do to prove that you don't actually want peace is make a list of people who don't deserve it. If there's one item on that list, then what you want is conditional, and peace is not. What humans want isn't peace but supremacy.

[bleakbeauty]

None of your individual constituents is alive on its own. If the things that constitute you should come to constitute a rock, that rock would retain none of your life. "Life" is shorthand for a subset of processes that we've arbitrarily decided matter. Everything is made of processes. You needn't zoom out very far to find a perspective from which it doesn't matter what's alive.

[bleakbeauty]

[bleakbeauty]

Most people are wisps blinking in and out of a wasteland on the outskirts of substantive experience. Any demand on their attention seems egregious to them because they're accustomed to a world without much to notice.

[bleakbeauty]

Kindness fosters social cohesion. Anything that fosters social cohesion encourages tribalness. The more cohesive a tribe is, the better it will be at waging war. Kindness and cruelty have the same aim: the defeat of enemies.

Human altruism is necessarily parochial. Equality makes human groups stronger so they can out-compete other groups. Any group they don't want to destroy, they must consider part of their own. Humans don't want a kinder world for the cruel. Kindness is a way to make war on cruelty.

Moral philosophy is a way to talk about how people could behave, but philosophy doesn't inform human nature. No matter what they believe, humans will do whatever humans tend to do. And what they tend to do is kill each other.

[bleakbeauty]