Destined to Live the Same Life Over Again
What If Y'all Had to Repeat Your Life Forever?
The concept of eternal recurrence is both fascinating and haunting
What if you had to live your life all over again, from the showtime twenty-four hour period to the last — with no changes at all, the same choices made and every particular already fixed?
This isn't like Groundhog Day, where you proceed repeating one mean solar day until — cue cheerful music — y'all effigy out what you were doing wrong and the loop breaks. So you somehow make a drastic change, your unabridged perspective on life shifted even as the outside world barely moves frontwards in time. That's how it works in experience-good movies. That'due south how information technology works in stories where a sensible ending is necessary.
But here's something thornier: stretch out Groundhog Day to a lifetime, and have it run on infinity, with no escape promised — and no changes allowed. That'south the rough thought of eternal recurrence, a concept of fourth dimension that humans accept been playing with since the ancients decided to speculate almost the nature of the universe.
Quantum physics hasn't exactly figured out how time works nevertheless, meaning that this is a mystery that's been on our heads for ages. Clocks and calendars paint time as linear, the numbers calculation up neatly.
But what if time actually is round, similar the archetype symbol of the ouroboros where a snake bites its tail to form a perfect, unbreakable ring?
After all, nature seems to favor the cyclical. The seasons take turns every twelvemonth, man beings come out into the world every bit screechy babies then bring forth the next generation and dissolve dorsum into the globe, and even the sunrise and the sunset mark each of our days.
If time is circular, then presumably, we will reach the so-called end somewhen — only to cycle back to the starting time, history starting from cypher all over again. The clock rewinds in a flash. The universe will play out as neatly every bit a chess game, waiting for you to appear in the scene after thousands of years — and you'll step into your office faithfully, never deviating from the gestures you made in other cycles.
Is this horrifying, or is information technology beautiful?
Nietzsche poses it equally a haunting thought experiment: imagine that a demon appears to you when you're in a country of ache or loneliness. It tells you about eternal recurrence in edgeless terms — you will have to repeat your life an infinite number of times, with the same thoughts and emotions and events. Then he asks what your reaction would be:
"Would you not throw yourself downwardly and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you one time experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard annihilation more divine.'"
Because it would accept to be either of those extremes, wouldn't it? If I were to guess, I'd say that most of us would probably cringe at the idea of repeating everything in our life. No matter how fulfilled we might feel in the present, it's painful to imagine going through all of the embarrassing mistakes again, the dubiousness, the trauma. Whatever lessons we've learned would be undone. We would accept to grapple with the same bug over again — granted, we would exist mercifully unaware of the repetition, just it's still frustrating to consider.
On the other manus, at that place would be no real good day. Whatever skilful thing we've encountered or whoever we love would always come dorsum to u.s., somewhat similar in the movie l Start Dates where a main grapheme'southward retentivity resets every day and so it's equally if she keeps coming together her boyfriend for the first time.
Between both of these, how would you answer Nietzsche?
When I read it the kickoff time effectually, my instinctive reaction was horror. Revulsion. Information technology sounded like a fate worse than hell, comparable to the myth of Sisyphus where he'due south doomed to push a heavy boulder upwards a mountain for all eternity — only to take it come tumbling down once more once he reaches the peak. There are no torturous fires here, no excruciating pain like Prometheus's liver being eaten upwardly past an eagle, merely the pointlessness and lack of meaning, the monotony of information technology, would maybe be more than enough to drive one to madness — if nosotros were conscious of it.
I didn't desire to go through my past over again. If anything, in a universe where we could relive our lives, I'd scramble for the chance to make edits. To take alternative paths, exploring who I could take been otherwise and actualizing every "what if." It'd be the perfect makeover — I'd redo everything until I had the all-time possible issue.
So I daydreamed briefly, imagining the changes I'd brand.
But then I stopped after just a few seconds. Because… if I made a different option so I could avert a bad affair, that would catapult me into another life birthday. And I wouldn't take gotten to know the people that I'g close to right now, the experiences that came to define me, the places that still stand out vibrantly in my memory.
To avert something unpleasant, I would have to give up the good things that information technology concluded up leading to, whether directly or indirectly.
I thought near passing past my best friend somewhere in the city, or seeing my partner'southward writing somewhere online and feeling a tug of connectedness, a sense of deja-vu — but it would be 1-sided, because to them I would merely exist a stranger.
Surprisingly, that was a price I wasn't sure I was willing to pay. Even if, theoretically, I wouldn't remember, and other people would make full in the gap, maybe fifty-fifty fit it better, I had this stubborn sense that I couldn't just replace people like that. And in a strange style, this life — equally imperfect as it has been — is mine.
Could I throw well-nigh of it away, only like that?
Nietzsche followed up with this:
"The question in each and every thing, 'Practise you want this once more and innumerable times more?' would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would y'all accept to become to yourself and to life?"
In a globe where every action comes back for us again to enact, I suppose we would tread more than carefully. What he's request is zero less than: what choices are worth repeating, for all eternity?
Source: https://medium.com/bigger-picture/what-if-you-had-to-repeat-your-life-forever-5d2c14e63222
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