Brief 17: All Possibilities

I was idly wondering about what was the “Best Year” in my lifetime, as in, the year the world was most stable and full of hope, when the most good things and the fewest bad things happened. Quickly realising how impossible that would be to come to without various forms of subjectivity taking over, I was drawn back to a concept that has occupied me for a long time, that of possibility.

Putting aside notions of predetermination for now, I wonder if there is a point in history when we switched from a world of infinite possibility to a world of dwindling possibility? In a way, that reflects our own life – though, in reality, we’re moving to death from the second we’re born, I think we usually perceive as growing up to a certain point, of burgeoning possibility, until there may come a single point, or a series of events, from which we realise we are growing old. (I realise this is a simplification to an extent).

For me, the personal and the global coincided closely enough for the two to be inextricably linked. Putting aside that my hair started receding when I was barely out of university (an early helpful hint about the inevitability of decline for some young men) it was really when I had my first DVT in 2007 that I grasped mortality and knew I’d never be truly young again. This was, initially and a for a long time, overwhelmingly positive for me. Days and details became important, I just found myself enjoying life a great deal more.

My revelation about humanity’s mortality had come a few years earlier, but was still burgeoning at that point. I think it’s been since about 2004 that I’ve seen possibility as somehow reducing rather than growing. Again, there is, initially at least, a freedom to a such a realisation.

I wonder if that’s a fairly accurate date or if it’s a long time earlier. I wonder at what point we relinquished any control of our destiny and of the world we’d be living through and leaving behind.

There is, of course, no answer to this, there are just billions of different experiences. There is only delusion in an idea like “till 2010, there was still hope and infinite possibility”, but anyway, heyho, something to think about…