{"id":97,"date":"2006-10-17T08:40:18","date_gmt":"2006-10-17T13:40:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stein.everybody.org\/journal\/posts\/slowly-approaching\/"},"modified":"2013-04-27T14:18:59","modified_gmt":"2013-04-27T18:18:59","slug":"slowly-approaching","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/journal\/slowly-approaching\/","title":{"rendered":"Slowly approaching"},"content":{"rendered":"

Statistically, I’ve got 40-something years before I die. That’s a good chunk of time to do important things, make something of my life, etc. But it doesn’t matter how successful or interesting or happy my life may be. In each moment, whether it be used for industry, pleasure, or loitering, death is moving steadily closer. It may be far away and it may be moving slowly, but it is always moving.
\n
\nWhen I was a child, I thought up the most horrifying science fiction plot I could imagine. A probe, a hovering black mechanical probe is hunting me down. I imagine it looks something like the mind probe<\/a> that approached Princess Leia for her interrogation. (It was likely the horror of that brief scene that inspired this idea.) The probe is not moving quickly. I am in no immediate danger. I can outpace it by simply walking. The horror is that the probe never stops. No matter what I do or where I go, the probe continues slowly toward me. I imagine that it might surprise me the first time I encounter it. Perhaps I barely escape its instrument of death. I run away and then I watch it from a distance. I realize that the only way to keep it from killing me is to get far from it. I go home, and quickly prepare to travel far away, to the other side of the world. Somehow I manage to get a flight that same day, and as I sit on the airplane, just before it takes off, I see the probe cross over the airport fence. But it’s too late. We take off.<\/p>\n

I settle in my new home, in my new country. The probe is far away. I won’t have to worry about it for a long time. But as the years pass, I know the whole time that the probe continues to pursue me. It travels across the ocean, alone, undetected, and undeterred. I’m not exactly certain when the probe will reach me. I know it’s getting closer. I scan the horizon constantly. I have trouble sleeping. I can never know whether the probe is hundreds of miles away, or just around the corner. The only thing I know for sure is that it’s closer now than it was.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Statistically, I’ve got 40-something years before I die. That’s a good chunk of time to do important things, make something of my life, etc. But it doesn’t matter how successful or interesting or happy my life may be. In each moment, whether it be used for industry, pleasure, or loitering, death is moving steadily closer. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-97","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":292,"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97\/revisions\/292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}