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Notes -
I actually agree with everything you said here, and I've been pondering the parallels to the Cold War (I have a family history of hippiness on my mother's side). I see this as very similar to deciding that worrying about it was too much, so you just stop reading the paper, and instead read novels.
Intellectually, I really thought I'd met and defeated existentialism decades ago. But Aurelius has a bit early in Meditations where he says that all men know they'll eventually die, but the situation is actually worse than that because you'll probably go feeble and senile first, so your effective time is actually less than the span of your life. This is hitting me like an early dementia diagnosis. The degree of anxiety is not terribly rational, but it's also proving resistant to rational counter-argument, like the one you offered. There is probably a great deal of ape status anxiety involved as well.
And on a random tangent because there will probably not be a better time, you once showed up in a dream. I was on some sort of a stone quay, looking for some random dream nonsense thing, and something in my brain said about a figure standing near the water "Hey, that's 2rafa". I offered a polite acknowledgement, literally "Oh hey, how's it going?" "Good, you?" "Good, gotta run, have a good one." "You too." And then took off chasing a boat or something. It was just very funny to me, because I have fairly severe aphantasia and sometimes joke that I live in a world of words and numbers, and apparently my subconscious doesn't even bat an eye about visually "recognizing" someone I've never seen in any format whatsoever.
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