Doomscrolling: The Ends that Justify Meanings

This morning, I woke up at 11:30. I left my bed at 16:30. This means that five hours have gone missing.

Now I want to die.

I have been dealing with these mysterious cases of missing hours for years now. Sometimes as little as a single, even half an hour vanishes. Usually it is more.

Sometimes, the number reaches double digits. This happens more often than you’d think.

The longer the missing span of time, the worse the effects. Tiredness. Self-disdain. A distinct feeling of complete and utter emptiness.

For a long time, the primary theory involved me forgetting to eat.

I’ve started an alternative theory.

Are you ready?

I think these lost moments are encounters with divine infinity.

Think about it.

The primary symptom is a loss of time. What is time? Time, it’s whatever is between the beginning and the end. That’s what time is. It’s precisely that space, or whatever, between tick and tock, between the Big Bang and the moment the athlete passes the finish line, between the first capital and the period. Between Alpha and Omega. That’s time.

Time is between. It needs a beginning, it needs and end. If something does not have those things, it is not time; it is something else. It is infinite, and it is divine.

But it doesn’t make sense, does it?

Clearly, there’s a beginning and an end. They’re clearly marked, even – 11:30, 16:30. How does infinity fit in five hours? How has divinity snuck into my bedroom?

But it does make sense, doesn’t it?

We deal with arbitrary beginnings, endings and lacks thereof all the time. It’s what’s needed to create a story of any kind.

I’ve been paying attention to the NBA, lately. At some point in history, it was decided that a basketball game will end 48 minutes of playing time after it begins. This ending moment is completely arbitrary, of course – it might just as well have been 12, or 56, or 480 minutes – but it is important nonetheless. Having a predetermined ending allows there to be a game in the first place, allows a story to be told; without a predetermined ending, there can be no winner, and without a winner, there is no reason to play. And without a reason to play, there would be no beginning. The same game of meaning is played on a larger scale. A season is predetermined to last 82 games, followed by a number of play-off series. The winner of the play-off series is said to be the champion, the greatest team – and the fact that over the course of the season they were most likely defeated many times over no longer matters. This is how narratives are created.

The thing is that I – that we – seem to be able to think only in terms of narratives and stories. We use stories for our existence the same way that mathematics uses numbers. It’s the fabric of the thing. It’s how we know things. How we make things real.

But, then, it doesn’t make sense, does it?

After all, don’t I want to live forever? Don’t we all?

If something ends, truly ends, then what was the point? The result of a complete ending is a death, more than a death. It is silent, it is still. It is nothing; when all motion ceases, does matter even exist? Does anything exist?

Has anything ever existed?

I am not the only one who is worried about this, and I know that is the case because of the question just about every religion seems to give an answer to: “what happens after I die?”

Because the simplest answer is, of course, nothing. Life ceases to exist, and the body it inhabited becomes dust. Life ends, and after that nothing happens ever again.

And so, we say to ourselves, death is the end; but it is not The End. When you die, you end, but you also go to Hades, or Valhalla, or Heaven or Hell. Forever, divine infinity. Live in death, to no End.

…

I-

Excuse me, to what end?

Is there no End, then, in the afterlife? But then-

There are two options, I suppose. Either existence after the end is meaningful, but then it must also, at some point, end. A human is reincarnated into another creature, the resting souls in Valhalla are called to arms during Ragnarök, and at the End of Times, Heaven and Earth collapse into one another to create a new city under God. Jannah is eternal, but filled with cycles of repetition; ends that are not Ends. Or, alternatively, there is no end after the end, meaning death is the true End, which is still and meaningless. A warrior that enters the Greek underworld will be spattered with blood for the rest of eternity. No future ending, no change, no meaning. Eternal nothingness, The End.

Hades provides a morbid death.

And yet, we have Sisyphus.

Albert Camus’ famous parable, from the old Greek myth: in that Greek underworld of infinite stasis and meaninglessness, there is a king who is eternally doomed to roll a massive boulder up a hill. He may reach his goal; but as soon as he does, the darned rock rolls down the other side, and his task begins anew. Of this myth of eternal torture, the Frenchman simply says:

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Sisyphus’ work does not, in fact, have an Ending; but it has an end. The end is when the boulder rests on top of the mountain. He will never actually reach that end, that much is true; but there is, at the very least, a perception of an end. And so, there is a perception of a beginning. And so, there is time. And life. And, in some shape, meaning.

I have danced around the mystery of the missing hours for long enough – or perhaps, not at all.

The truth is that I live in a world in which powerful entities hold a vested interest in my perception of time.

I should be more specific.

Companies want my time and attention, so that they can use their platforms to advertise to me, in order to make money off of my time.

My limited life span.

Yours, too.

So they appeal to you, and your greedy soul.

Your soul that wants to live forever.

“There’s no end!”

“Eternal growth!”

“Are you in?”

Are you in?

Just like that, with a magic trick, with smoke and mirrors, the end is no longer in sight.

And with no end in sight, meaning starts to get blurry.

And time ceases to exist.

I believe I have solved this whodunnit.

The ending is in sight.