I was talking to my sister and we were discussing my grandmother’s biblical literacy. My sister said that she wasn’t that literal, as, for example, my grandmother thought that the story of Methuselah and the giants was just bunk. I then started thinking about how Methuselah, peaking at 904 years old, probably watched his children die. And then I started thinking that if there was a situation where people live hundreds and hundreds of years, and then life spans slowly(?) decreased to today’s current current 3 score & 10, then there must have been a longish period in human history where parents expected to see their children to die before they did. Imagining the horror that must have had on the then-civilization, I then wondered whether or not there were other periods in human history, more defined, in which we could actually study a similar phenomenon. And for some reason I started thinking about animal populations in the industrial revolution, knowing that there are hundreds of thousands of species which have seen calamitous population declines over the past 250 years. Then I started wondering what psychological impact that had on the animals.
And this is how I ended up wondering if squirrels are more psychologically happy then, say, bobcats as a whole.
Not necessarily. Suppose the human lifespan decreased by one or two years per generation. Then children could still easily outlive their parents.
But until relatively recently (i.e. until the availability of modern vaccines and antibiotics) it was depressingly common for offspring to die in infancy or childhood. Parents couldn’t just assume that all their children would live to maturity. (Of course, even today, there’s no guarantee, but it’s the exception rather than the rule.)
We put human emotions onto animals.
They don’t necessarily know or believe the people they live with will still live when they die
I do believe many animals know when they’re close to death. And they hide to die.
It must be an easier way to deal with life. Just live til you die. No big deal.
Now that I’m past the “three score and ten”, I’ve come to view my life in exactly this way. I’m alive today and may be dead tomorrow. We’re all just passing through.
Often when I am reading a book, a word or phrase will jump out at me that will make me think of something, which gets me to think about something else, then something else… and the next thing I know I’ve read the entire page without remembering anything about it, and have to go back to the top and start over, being careful not to get sidetracked again.
I have to just live til I don’t. I have no choice.
I’ve tried, with little success, to tell the young adults in my life, this.
They don’t feel comfortable listening to me say these things.
I get it, when you’re young you can’t know that end of life is just part of life.
Son-of-a-wrek has had a epiphany about his life when he wrecked his truck. He claims he had a near death experience in the ambulance.
He tries to listen to me. I can only go so far and I see him getting uncomfortable with his ‘Ma’ having these thoughts.
It is what it is.
What do the say? “You come into this world alone and leave this world alone”
