Some serious thinking
Feb. 10th, 2008 11:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qcontinuumOOC: Reposted from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
theatrical_muse from 4/15/2005, 28 of 50.
This is actually an unusually decent crop of questions. I'm amazed.
Describe what your "happily ever after" would be like.
This isn't a hypothetical question for someone who will probably live forever, you realize.
There is no such thing as eternal happiness, unless you are really, really boring. By definition, happiness is the state of being content with life, of having everything you want for a particular moment in time. But life is about striving for change, for personal betterment, for knowledge and power and I don't know, just having something *different* around. If you must always want things to change or suffer boredom (which would make you unhappy), then you cannot be eternally happy. You must frequently suffer discontent, pursuing things you don't have yet, wanting and striving.
So "happily ever after" is a contradiction. But to come close to it, one would have a life where there are constantly new things to do, new ideas to learn, new places to explore. Where one would have a base, where one feels safe and secure, and one would frequently venture out from that base to experience new things. Where there are companions to enjoy the new things with, but they don't control or impede one's ability to explore.
I have news for would-be immortals. It's like that for the first two billion years or so. Then the ennui starts to set in. Because once you have explored everywhere, seen everything, learned everything, done everything... what else is there?
"Happily ever after" is not possible.
What does the word 'love' mean to you?
Love. Ah, what a useless term. Redolent in so many connotations and implications it's become almost meaningless. Are we talking about platonic love, the love of a friend or companion? Romantic love, the love for a person you want to have sex with? Parental love, the love for a child? Agape, eros, what?
By some definitions one might have to say I love the Continuum, and as soon as you've said *that* you've made the word useless, because my feelings toward the Continuum are so complicated they may as well cancel each other out. I think I can say with reasonable accuracy that I love my son, but he's also the source of most of the stress in my life lately. Perhaps that's always true of what people love. In that case, the excessive lionization of the emotion that poets commit is foolish. Love is the source of as much pain as it is joy.
Have you ever regretted a wish you made? Why/what happened?
Yeah. I wanted to have a kid. And I regret that constantly.
Of course, I think I would also regret not having had the kid. I miss my old life, my old self, but I wouldn't be much of an avatar of change if I wasn't willing to embrace change in my own life.
The thing about regrets is that there is no point to them if you are, overall, satisfied with your life. If you did things differently you'd be a different person now, and if the person you are now appeals to you, why regret the steps you took to become that person?
What is so important to you that without it, life would not be worth living? Why?
This is an interesting question. Since I have, in fact, been in a situation where I thought life was not worth living, I think I can answer this one... though I'm not sure the answer is exactly coming out the way I expected.
My first, and rather glib, reply was to say my powers, of course. But when I was stripped of my powers, it wasn't the loss of my powers per se that led me to try to kill myself. I was, at first, committed to at least *trying* to endure my new life. Then I found out that my enemies were going to get me no matter what, and the obvious solution to the problem "What's better, the death of one person or the death of that same person plus lots of others" is the first. Even as stupid as I was as a human, I could do that math. But I don't think I'd have let myself realize how hopeless my situation was if I'd really wanted to live. I would have rationalized, or pretended that I believed Picard and his crew could solve the problem and still keep me alive.
What made me realize that there was no point to my existence was that I belonged to nothing. No one cared about me. If I died, I thought, no one would miss me. The group that I'd used to belong to, the one I'd raged against and declared frequently that I wanted to be left alone by... they'd thrown me out. They didn't care any more. And the group I was trying to join didn't *want* me. And they never would, because I was morally inferior to them by their own standards. The Q Continuum had declared I wasn't worthy to be a Q, by Q standards, and everything the humans said and did showed they believed I wasn't worthy to be a human by human standards.
I like to think of myself as self-sufficient. A universe unto myself. I don't need friends, I don't need people to *like* me, I am thoroughly unhampered by any such weak emotional needs. But it's a lie, and I know now that it's a lie. As much as I hate it, I need to belong to something. As much as I want to be a law unto myself, I need to be seen by *someone* besides myself as meeting their criteria for someone worth existing. If no one cares about me at all, if no one particularly wants me to live, if no one sees any value in me at all... then my life is not worth living.
You know, I really hate that answer. It would suit me a lot better to be able to say "my powers" or, perhaps, "something to entertain me". But I was willing to live through the loss of my powers; I was willing to live through boredom. Believing that my existence was of no value to anyone besides myself was what made me want to kill myself.
theatrical_muse from 4/15/2005, 28 of 50.This is actually an unusually decent crop of questions. I'm amazed.
Describe what your "happily ever after" would be like.
This isn't a hypothetical question for someone who will probably live forever, you realize.
There is no such thing as eternal happiness, unless you are really, really boring. By definition, happiness is the state of being content with life, of having everything you want for a particular moment in time. But life is about striving for change, for personal betterment, for knowledge and power and I don't know, just having something *different* around. If you must always want things to change or suffer boredom (which would make you unhappy), then you cannot be eternally happy. You must frequently suffer discontent, pursuing things you don't have yet, wanting and striving.
So "happily ever after" is a contradiction. But to come close to it, one would have a life where there are constantly new things to do, new ideas to learn, new places to explore. Where one would have a base, where one feels safe and secure, and one would frequently venture out from that base to experience new things. Where there are companions to enjoy the new things with, but they don't control or impede one's ability to explore.
I have news for would-be immortals. It's like that for the first two billion years or so. Then the ennui starts to set in. Because once you have explored everywhere, seen everything, learned everything, done everything... what else is there?
"Happily ever after" is not possible.
What does the word 'love' mean to you?
Love. Ah, what a useless term. Redolent in so many connotations and implications it's become almost meaningless. Are we talking about platonic love, the love of a friend or companion? Romantic love, the love for a person you want to have sex with? Parental love, the love for a child? Agape, eros, what?
By some definitions one might have to say I love the Continuum, and as soon as you've said *that* you've made the word useless, because my feelings toward the Continuum are so complicated they may as well cancel each other out. I think I can say with reasonable accuracy that I love my son, but he's also the source of most of the stress in my life lately. Perhaps that's always true of what people love. In that case, the excessive lionization of the emotion that poets commit is foolish. Love is the source of as much pain as it is joy.
Have you ever regretted a wish you made? Why/what happened?
Yeah. I wanted to have a kid. And I regret that constantly.
Of course, I think I would also regret not having had the kid. I miss my old life, my old self, but I wouldn't be much of an avatar of change if I wasn't willing to embrace change in my own life.
The thing about regrets is that there is no point to them if you are, overall, satisfied with your life. If you did things differently you'd be a different person now, and if the person you are now appeals to you, why regret the steps you took to become that person?
What is so important to you that without it, life would not be worth living? Why?
This is an interesting question. Since I have, in fact, been in a situation where I thought life was not worth living, I think I can answer this one... though I'm not sure the answer is exactly coming out the way I expected.
My first, and rather glib, reply was to say my powers, of course. But when I was stripped of my powers, it wasn't the loss of my powers per se that led me to try to kill myself. I was, at first, committed to at least *trying* to endure my new life. Then I found out that my enemies were going to get me no matter what, and the obvious solution to the problem "What's better, the death of one person or the death of that same person plus lots of others" is the first. Even as stupid as I was as a human, I could do that math. But I don't think I'd have let myself realize how hopeless my situation was if I'd really wanted to live. I would have rationalized, or pretended that I believed Picard and his crew could solve the problem and still keep me alive.
What made me realize that there was no point to my existence was that I belonged to nothing. No one cared about me. If I died, I thought, no one would miss me. The group that I'd used to belong to, the one I'd raged against and declared frequently that I wanted to be left alone by... they'd thrown me out. They didn't care any more. And the group I was trying to join didn't *want* me. And they never would, because I was morally inferior to them by their own standards. The Q Continuum had declared I wasn't worthy to be a Q, by Q standards, and everything the humans said and did showed they believed I wasn't worthy to be a human by human standards.
I like to think of myself as self-sufficient. A universe unto myself. I don't need friends, I don't need people to *like* me, I am thoroughly unhampered by any such weak emotional needs. But it's a lie, and I know now that it's a lie. As much as I hate it, I need to belong to something. As much as I want to be a law unto myself, I need to be seen by *someone* besides myself as meeting their criteria for someone worth existing. If no one cares about me at all, if no one particularly wants me to live, if no one sees any value in me at all... then my life is not worth living.
You know, I really hate that answer. It would suit me a lot better to be able to say "my powers" or, perhaps, "something to entertain me". But I was willing to live through the loss of my powers; I was willing to live through boredom. Believing that my existence was of no value to anyone besides myself was what made me want to kill myself.