Travelling into the future is an inverse archaeology of entropy. There is some possible future, a singular branch of most probable outcomes in an undiscovered and unknowable configuration of ourselves towards which we all travel.
A small consolation lies in being clever enough to decode this inexorable material process and abstract logical labyrinth of decay and metamorphosis – even while it occurs and inhabits us, no less than we inhabit it. We could hardly even think or worry if time, matter and information were not oriented towards disorder and personal extinction in the way they are.
Understanding the emptiness and inevitable absence of self in the future is not a burden, it is a gift – but is hidden and buried by the collective misapprehension of acquired, shared grammars of thought and cognition through which we all live and think. We journey through a territory and cartography of unknown and unknowable – that is what entropy is; the rank impossibility of epistemological closure and the inevitability of self-extinction hints at a very special kind of freedom.
We interpret absence of self and the future inevitability of arrival at that destination as a burden – I think we are (all) fundamentally misunderstanding something profound. In the end, words are empty but then, like Zen, so are we
