Published on 12, July, 2020
I've come to this realisation today sat in the library of my old university that the trajectory of my life is that I will be forgotten and die alone. This is where inertia seems to be taking me. Around me I see students making friends, sharing drinks, laughing. I am forgotten. connectionless. My few friends are either distant, busy or suicidal. My family is restless and leaving me behind. I have no wife, girlfriend or children. No one shares my interests, no one gets me. No one who is available, connectable that is. All I have is my science. It's the only thing I've been able to hang on to and even that has been a huge struggle.
Even if I am successful by normal career metrics I will most likely die alone and friendless, a lonely old university 'don.' The people I thought I would grow old with when I was younger will forget me, many will not even hear of my passing when it comes. They have their wives, husbands, serious others, a few of them have 'besties' of 'bffs.' Platonic friends they seemed joined at the hip to. Evidently, they all decided that shouldn't be me. Many have just disappeared. Even their Facebook pages deleted, almost nothing to show they were ever a part of my life.
I am tired of trying to be strong. I’m tired of trying to be good and take the moral high ground. But I don’t know how to be bad and even if I did it’s too late to do me any good. Lives of selfish and destructive indulgence are a young mans game and every day my body seems to betray me a little more. For years I tried to just pretend I wasn’t getting old. That nothing had changed since I was 18 or so. I probably still will as well as I can.
No councillor can help me. No program of inner healing or self-reflection can fix this mess. I need my circumstances to change. And no body cares. How could they, they barely know I exists and when I remind them of my existence the usual reaction is to try to sideline or exclude me as quickly as possible.
I need to do something radical. To pick the nuclear option, other wise my life will spiral down the plug hole unless a deus ex machina intervenes. But I’ve no idea what the nuclear option is.
Ideas?
Hi Peter,
The sad truth is that the majority of the people in the world will live and die, here one minute and then gone the next like a footprint on the beach. Remembered for a time by family and friends but eventually those who knew them are gone too. The ones who are remembered are the famous and infamous people. People who do something big, like a singer or writer, or people who do something so terrible they're written into history forever.
I am like a ghost in the world. I don't exist, no one sees me. As a child I was the same but mentally unwell, I became famous for a time after starting a fire which led to my having to go to a mental health unit but also led to my autism diagnosis. I'm better now but everyone who knew me then remembers me, not personally but for what I did. It won't last, I'm not written in to history but I was seen.
Not in the way I wanted to be.
If you want to exist, be seen and remembered you need to do something that the whole world would love. I would write a book, that seems to be a sure way of being remembered.
Authors make people happy, they bring them joy and authors from over a hundred years ago are still talked about today and their books enjoyed. It should be something you can do without your body failing you too much.
I do writing, it's good for you mentally as well.
Good luck.
You misunderstand, sure after we’re dead eventually we will all be forgotten. My point is nobody remembers me now while I’m alive. And that even my death wouldn’t impact most of them enough to notice.
Well there's still time to change this - you could still write a book, start a blog, do something in charity... all those things would be noticed 'now'. YouTube videos might be a good way forward, people seem to get Internet fame with it pretty quick
The nice thing is that once you’ve made some of this really expensive material it is often possible to keep it alive and multiply it with homebrewed stuff. But of course that would be highly legally questionable. At least in the UK and most of the EU I believe America has slightly more relaxed laws.
It’s tempting but unless you happen to have MegaBucks and a couple of shell corporations to funnel them through that’s not really very plausible.
getting hold of the rare chemicals and biological materials to make even the simplest gene therapy products is like pulling teeth. and just the process of making gene therapy products requires a government license. Which means in practice if you want these rare chemicals and DNA samples delivered to your address it needs to be a company or university that looks legit enough for the suppliers to want to do business with you. And even then they are very very expensive.
I put a grant application in for some fairly basic gene therapy lab work recently. working with cells not animals. it was rejected. but as I did the budgeting the cost went up and up and up. you can end up paying thousands of pounds just for a little vial of liquid. my boss said £10,000 for Materials for a basic cell culture experiment is generally not a bad ballpark figure to start from but because we had something creative stuff in mind it’s soon grew.