Death (Is the greatest motivator)
Some say fear is the greatest motivator. And fear is a great motivator. And while I do subscribe to the belief that fear itself causes humans to behave irrationally and perhaps forces them to take actions they otherwise would not do, I think death is the only, and thus greatest, motivator for everything.
In 4th grade (or maybe middle school I don't remember), we 4th graders use to debate the question of immortality. Was it worth the price? Was it "good" to be immortal? Would we take immortality over being able to be invisible and fly, combined?
From what I remember, the general consensus is that immortality is bad. Of course now with technology you can ask any AI for reasons on both sides of immortality, but more or less, immortality1 is boring.
To people, everything is cool nowadays. Youtube has shorts to binge. Apple constantly drops new product lines. Netflix has new shows that some end up watching just because they need something to watch. In all these cases, for the normal person, nothing is "boring" -- except maybe shorts/reels/tiktok if you watch that for too long. Yet we still end up gravitating towards these new apps/shows/products/etc. to fill our time and "cure" that oh so painful feeling of being bored -- a feeling that is (arguably) one of the2 feelings of all time.
Yet imagine being immortal. None of this stuff would matter. Presuming that "Earth" as we know it will be gone in a finite amount of time (a few billion years) and there is no new, other Earth-like civilization with Earth-like creatures so advanced, being immortal means you have time for everything (I mean, infinity is bigger than any finite number, and everything is finite, even though it may feel the opposite3). You would be able to watch literally every piece of content that has ever been made. And do that an infinite amount of times. And probably still have some time left over4. You'd be infinitely bored5, and thus be suffering for the majority of your life. Infinity is a big number.
Everything I've brought up so far is commonplace. Super simple. Intuitive even. It's come to be accepted (at least among my friends) that being immortal is probably a more bad thing than it is a good thing.
So on motivation. Why does one wake up in the morning? If you know you're going to wake up infinitely more, why does doing anything make sense? You literally have the exact same amount of time to do everything whether or not you do or do not do something (or anything), so why bother doing?
Of course, one can bring up the argument that given that Earth is going to not exist in a few billion years, if one continues this rationale for a few billion years (however long that is), one will eventually be unable to do the things they once wanted to do as Earth simply doesn't exist. To this, I counter with the fact that there will most likely be another Earth-like universe with Earth-like creatures etc etc that will come about. It's like monkeys typing Shakespeare -- the odds are atrocious that one will even manage to come out with even a word; but given literally a non-finite amount of time, anything is possible (as it is assumed every possible character sequence will be typed out by the monkeys).
Thus I conclude that if nothing is done without death, death is the reason why people do things, and thus death is the only motivator in the world.
Other:
>> I just finished "Unacceptable," a book detailing the Varsity Blues scandal. I really like the book. I don't really want to do a book review as every time I do that I just give the book 900/10 and then say a bunch of nothing while I do my best to not give away the plot, so I'll simply say it like this -- the journey is more important than the destination, and if given the chance, I would want to relive the journey (of reading through the book).
>> Housecat (Izaak Thomas), a cool musician, made the album New Shades of Blue. I discovered it today (or last night as it is 1:04am currently), and think it is very beautiful.
>> I played at the CSM Jazz Festival today. I really liked it although I was super sleepy. Pasquale Grasso is truly a delight, and I hope to find more people like him through my journey in life.
>> College apps are currently going turbulently for me :(. It'll be fine.
Footnotes:
I remember the joy of reading Rick Riordan's Greek Gods/Heroes series where he sort of recounts old Greek myths and epics perhaps in modern terminology and in a way that appeals to the average middle schooler. Anyways, I remember a section talking about how to "kill" an immortal person (or cyclops if I remember correctly). The play was essentially to cut that person and burn that person and transform that person into dust or ashes to be locked up in a jar somewhere, so that despite their immortality, they literally couldn't do anything as they were simply specks of dust. Thus, in our 4th grade debates on immortality, it is taken as a premise that you or your body or basically some form of your body that is able to act and think meaningfully will always be around (e.g. you will at least always have an arm you can move around). This implies that you are sorta indestructible/unkillable.↩
(worst)↩
"My computer has infinite storage!" It simply has a lot of gigabytes (or terabytes or petabytes or whatever) that satisfy your needs with lots of extra room.↩
okay mathematicians who claim that since time is linear and thus countable (e.g. in seconds), and since if k is the length of time of every piece of content ever made and to be made combined, then no time would be left over, I will simply say subtraction doesn't work when you deal with infinities.↩
One edge case which is too tricky for me to deal with is math. Since math is made up and theoretical and all this other stuff, math could theoretically be infinite -- mathematicians can always add new concepts on top of pre-existing frameworks, and thus math never really "ends" in a sense. I'm not gonna deal with this case as I will simply say that math is only applicable to the real world and after some infinite amount of time, math itself loses meaning. (Yes this is a weak argument)↩