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| post_date | created | counter | title | modified | url | public | version | scope | tumblr_id |
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| 2023-11-22 | 2024-03-05T13:50:33-03:00 | 17 | Momento Mori | 2024-03-26T11:57:14-03:00 | https://guz.one/17 | true | 1.0 | guzsdaily | 734708694860824576 |
Memento Mori
Hopefully, I will create a video essay in the future about this topic.
"Memento mori (Latin for 'remember that you [have to] die') is an artistic symbolic trope acting as a reminder of the inevitability of death. The concept has its roots in the philosophers of classical antiquity and Christianity, and appeared in funerary art and architecture from the medieval period onwards."
I have an interesting relationship with death and the general idea of "everything has an end" personally. I'm never able to think of it as something good or bad, relieving or depressing, unnatural or inevitable, I'm still young, and thankfully I haven't lost that many people yet to know my relationship with it completely. Personally, it would be great if we could cure aging and have a fulfilling mostly immortal lives and be able to experience the mind-blowing size of this universe, but maybe our brains cannot comprehend and process a life bigger than 100, 200, 500 years. The only thing I know today, is that someday, everything will be a memory, independent if I die or not, the word and people change, and this is something with cannot be "cured".
Memories
Not Being Able to Remember
One of the worst symptoms of something like anxiety, depression, bad mental health in general, or even just bad sleep, is the degradation of your long form memories. I can't remember things from 5 years ago easily, I can even remember things from when I was a young teenager, and I'm just 19 years old! My childhood and teenager years wasn't interesting enough to me to remember easily, I was always inside my home, didn't have any friends to talk to during school, I didn't hurt myself, played, risked myself to be able to pinpoint interesting moments of my life!
I can't remember the face of my deceased grandparents... I always had a difficult with faces, not being able to reconstruct the face of my girlfriend or parents easily in my mind, and not I can't even remember how my grandparents looked like when I visited their home every week...
Most of my childhood is just a faded image, with just small areas where I can recognize things.
Saving Memories
Something which I can't thank enough is how today we are able to save and store things and events in photos, hard drives, videos, text, chats, etc., it's a privilege to be able to just go back in a chat and remember a joke that made you laugh with your friend, open your gallery to see an image that you took with your parents when you were young, or even just open YouTube to see a creator that you watched on your childhood again.
But what would happen if all of it goes away? If one day YouTube shuts down, if Google Photos or iCloud stops working, if Discord deletes your account? What happens to all those memories of yours? Do you give enough attention and care to be able to remember them from your memory alone? And I'm going to be honest, I'm not here to give an answer, blame the dependency on technology in plain 21st century, we can't save everything in our brains. But again, wouldn't be at least better if you saved said memories in a USB? Local hard drive? Put your blog posts in plaintext or markdown? Remove at least the dependency on online services, y'know? Because one day, they will go out, it's easy to unplug a server, to delete an archive, to lose a backup that you can't control, the average lifetime of a company is just 15 years, Google has 25 already.
Sharing Memories
You probably already know the concept of "two deaths" - "Everyone has two deaths, one when the body dies, and the last time someone says their name" - and I think that this could be taken not just as a way of "make an impact in people's life", but also "share who you are, and you will be remembered who you were". And you shouldn't be remembered by just other people, but also yourself, to remember who you were.
I never thought a lot on posting about my life, who I am, share memories, events, things that are happening and struggles I'm facing. Neither talking to my friends nor family sometimes, I always felt that my life is uninteresting, that no one will remember what I said. But I'm starting to realize that, writing these posts and, even more, sharing my thoughts with the people that I care, started to help me remember who I am and who I were. The people who love you, the people who find you interesting, will remember, they will remember about you and your stories, and they will continue to tell them about you, to yourself! They will help you remember who you are and were!
And they will remember about you and not let you die after your body does. Share your and others' memories, don't let you and others die out.
Everything Has an End
Change Happens
A lot of times, the idea of "The End" is always associated with death, destruction, the complete stop of someone's or something's lifetime, but changes also end things. The person you were a year ago died, you change, your body has new cells. The world in which you lived in already died, government changes, experiences passes, people change jobs, technology and society progresses, and you can't do anything about it liking or not. Entropy cannot be stopped, and the world will never actually stop changing, for good or bad.
So everything will have an end, independent if it ends up being with a rewrite or complete burn of a book.
Unus Annus
And you probably are already asking, why? Why this entry about death and change out of nowhere? And the most honest answer that I can give is: I'm subscribed to Markiplier, and every year I'm remembered about a project which he made in 2020, when I wasn't subscribed, called Unus Annus. If you don't know about it, in summary it was a YouTube channel that he and Ethan Nestor created together, with the premise of "after one year, this channel will be deleted, and all the videos will be lost" - you probably can see the connection of death, memories, etc. here.
I didn't watch Unus Annus, I've never heard of it until around the end of 2022 I think, and now that the channel is gone, the only thing that are today are the memories and people who talk about them. And I will never be able to experience it, see the videos, the fun that it had, because it's gone, and I didn't even know, I can't go back in time or change the reality that time passed and things happened without me even knowing about.
You Can't Experience Everything
Even if one day immortality becomes a thing, we will never be able to experience how it was in the medieval times, how the steam engine was created, and the start of electricity. I will never be able to know how a world without internet was, how World War was, how a world without computer and the digital machines worked. The only thing that we can have are the memories and experiences of others about said things.
One of the things that probably a lot of people have today is the want to do a lot of things, create worlds, draw characters, create software, create histories. But even if time was limitless, said things could fade away, software can have another meaning with new technologies, worlds can be created by others before we, or characters can lose their meaning after a while, so there can be a chance where we will not experience all of them. However, we will be able to talk to people who done said things, who experienced them, who created the same things you wanted to create, and those people will be jumping of joy to have someone to share their experience and memories with.
Everyone likes to share memories, and the more we share, the more immortal we are.
Today's artists & creative things
Video: Unus Annus: The Most Interesting Channel (not) On YouTube - by
TheSyperiorAfter watching Markiplier's Unus Annus death anniversary video, I was recommended this video essay by TheSyperior about the channel. Because of this I made this journal entry in the first place, so it would be correct to recommend also the video to know about the history and how Unus Annus affected people.
© 2024 Gustavo "Guz" L. de Mello. Licensed under CC
BY-SA 4.0 /by-sa/4.0)