Just remember the sun will explode.

Norm Macdonald died a couple days ago. Never met him but I know I'm going to miss his comedy. I watched a lot of it.

I think you probably noticed I'm preoccupied with death at the moment. With Lynn Ruth and Norm Macdonald and us talking about suicide last week and with me constantly worrying about dying and my kid not being prepared for the world.

I guess I'm obsessed with control. I wish I could just know that everything will be all right. But of course, there is no way of knowing for sure. So I distract myself with the hobbies and interests but the fear of everything spinning out of control is always in the background. So I zoom in and focus on carving a piece of wood, or learning a song on the guitar, or finishing a computer game and everything is okay for awhile, until something else needs attention and then I zoom out and see that everything is fucked up. My son needs to transition from homeschooling to University, my friend Bob is still not fully recovered, we had 22000 new Covid cases in Malaysia yesterday, Najib is going to be our economic adviser, people still don't trust the vaccines, I'm not sure if I am good at comedy anymore or if I ever was. Arrgghhhh!

But here's the funny thing... if I zoom out a little more, then everything is okay again. Life's short anyway, right? And I'm like 3/4 through mine already if I'm lucky. I've done enough to not fall off it so far and if I can just somehow maintain my sanity for another 10 to 20 years, I'm crushing it. And then when I die,  everything's going to be okay. Everyone's going to be okay. My wife, my son. They can figure the rest out for themselves. Maybe I won't leave behind a big legacy and that's okay too. Because if I zoom out a little further, one day, the sun will explode and wipe out all of humanity and all traces that we ever existed. Then, everyone that ever lived - you, me, Leonardo DaVinci, Norm Macdonald, Hitler's mom - will all have the same legacy.

In a convoluted way, that's kind of comforting.


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