“love is less always than to win” - E. E. Cummings
There’s a theory that it’s just you living every single person’s life, when you die you are reincarnated as the person born right after you were. You’ve committed every atrocity and suffered every consequence. You’ve survived and died by the worst torture, and you doled it.
So now every time I learn about a new horror, a new murder, a new accident, it’s instinct to think about myself there, lying under rubble, thrown in a septic tank, drowning under a million gallons of salt water. It’s instinct to see myself release the bomb, desecrate a dead body, steer myself directly into the bottom of the ocean.
This empathy will not help anyone, but me perhaps. I am not above any cruelty, any stupidity, any mistake. And I am not above the pain it causes either.
I hope this theory is not true. It would be a lonely world, just me and the spinning Earth.