When the rich American dies he will be able to say that he created jobs and employment for people. His hard work kept other people alive. And when he dies the money he made will support his family. When the Mexican dies his wife and child will be left with nothing bar a rotting boat and some tuna pasta.
I agree, reading those stories are only for when you feel depressed. Aspiring to do nothing with your life is not healthy at all.
[quote]When the rich American dies he will be able to say that he created jobs and employment for people. His hard work kept other people alive. And when he dies the money he made will support his family. When the Mexican dies his wife and child will be left with nothing bar a rotting boat and some tuna pasta.
[/quote]
Or the flip side is that when he dies, he may feel a tinge of guilt. Although he created employment for some, he will have relieved other’s of their jobs in the name of efficiency and cost-cutting. Market domination and price fixing to undercut local producers will have put many traditional ways of life at risk and eradicated some altogether, resulting in the partial destruction of 100’s, if not 1000’s of years of traditional subsistence farming. Intensive fishing will have depleted stocks, resulting in more hardship for locally farmed produce and will have put greater strain on the environment.
When he dies, his insurance company will give his wife and family a big payout.
When the Mexican dies, the family ties and friendship created through the years become his family’s insurance policy and the village community will ensure that the family is able to live on in relative comfort, as has been the way since the beginning of time.
The majority of people around the world live somewhat similarly to the Mexican in this story, and rely on the environment and work with it and their communities in order to etch out a reasonable living. Corporations and commerce often destroy these ways of life without a second glance.
For people to be rich, some people need to be poor. Not everyone can be rich and successful, and not everyone should have the desire to. But everybody should have the desire to be content.
(Of course, that’s just a different angle and not necessarily my opinion).
Hi Finley.
In what way - you mean describe the experience of it? I don’t mind sharing it, I’m just not sure how to explain it.
Not at all. When you are dead you don’t feel or think anything. No tinges no guilt nada zero zip zilch
Not at all. When you are dead you don’t feel or think anything. No tinges no guilt nada zero zip zilch[/quote]
How do you know?
yeah how do we know? I think when I’m dead it will be like before I was conceived, and since there was absolutely nothing - voila!
Watch Lost series 1-6. I’m telling you, it has the answers.
Cheer up fuckers. Everything is ok.
I realise it’s not going to be easy to describe - I’m just curious what happened to you (I mean how you ended up nearly dead) and exactly what you experienced. Regardless of whether one believes in an afterlife or not, I’m very interested in what happens during NDE. I can certainly understand why you consider yourself “lucky”.
Not at all. When you are dead you don’t feel or think anything. No tinges no guilt nada zero zip zilch[/quote]
How do you know?[/quote]
Because he or she is a Replicant?
Does anything in this thread have anything to do with Taiwan?
I’m a little unwilling to go into details of how it happened. The people who were present at the time told me that I was not breathing for between 30 seconds to one minute. However, I have recently learned that it was actually closer to 3 minutes
It is very difficult to describe, and I have been wondering how to describe it. I have come to the conclusion that I just don’t have the available language at hand.
During the experience, as I think I stated earlier, I didn’t feel anything nor have any concept of what was going on, but there were visuals which I remember – basically darkness with a very long sinew of what looked like light - but this wasn’t the typical walking towards the light kind of experience you often hear people talking about on TV, this was like looking at a stream of light or time from very far away, and the sinew was not straight - rather like a bolt of lightning which is permanent and doesn’t move. What I was looking at I later interpreted to be life itself - either mine or life in general, and I was outside it. It was more like knowing I was looking at life, without consciously thinking about it.
After that, or in the process of coming round, I felt total isolation, detachment and lonliness and a feeling that after life, there is really nothing. I remember thinking “Is that it?”
All life on earth serves a purpose only to exist and then there is nothing - no point to it all except to fulfill it’s own existence.
It was an overpowering feeling that lasted several weeks, until I realised that If I’d had the experience of not being fully alive, then I must have been alive to have had the experience.
Ultimately, this experience taught me to accept how things are. What is, is. One can only influence things or people to a certain degree. However, everybody is somehow connected: we are branches off the core of life, whatever that is.
That’s the philosophical side of it. The physical side of the experience could just be that through the initial stages of death, the human brain gets confused and starts to hallucinate, and people who experience these hallucinations only remember them because they were somehow lucky enough to come back. From the memories of the experience, people try to attach meaning to it.
What I do know is that i never, ever want to be in a coma. That is the ultimate feeling of being trapped. For the very short time that I was starting to come round, I could hear things but I had no idea who or what I was, no feeling of being human at all - just a feeling of being trapped and unable to communicate. Those few seconds lasted for what would seem in real time to be about an hour. That was one of the worst, most terrifying things that I have ever experienced and I never want to go there again.
Anyway, all this put life into perspective for me. I have an understanding, although I’m not entirely sure what that understanding is, and I hope one day I’ll be able to learn from it.