Confessions of A Dying Millennial

Sometimes I daydream about what it would be like to be a bat, an eagle catching its prey, that stranger I saw smiling on the subway, or dead. I think about why I’d want a physicist to deliver the eulogy at my funeral and remind the attendees that “all the photons that bounced from [Jesi] were gathered in the particle detectors that are [their] eyes, that those photons created within [their] constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.”

There are moments when I’m either too stress or too bored to think straight and I close my eyes and think about what a sunset might have looked like three million years ago. Before air pollution, before concrete jungles sprang up and obstructed our views of the sky above.

It’s things like that that always make me pause before answering when someone asks, “how are you?”

Usually, I tend to think of a basic, regular, degular, shmegular response that captures some semblance of how I’m genuinely feeling. Something like, “I’m decent” or “you know, taking life one moment at a time” or “I don’t know, but I’m trying to appreciate all of life’s blessings.”

In the back of my mind, though, I’m really thinking, “it worries me that everywhere I go could be my final resting place and my name could become a viral hashtag under some tragic circumstances and even if that doesn’t happen I’m still an unknown number of heartbeats away from my inevitable death. Oh, and polar bears are drowning. ” Nine times out of ten I’ll just say, “good, and you?”

Maybe one of these days I’ll respond with, “actually, I’m curious to know if you’re as stressed about Near Earth Objects and their capacity to completely destroy human civilization as we know it. Especially given society’s lack of focus on astronomical dangers and threats.”

It would really, really suck to live through a mass extinction event involving a several-miles-wide asteroid. Would our deaths be…

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