Life is hard

Today I had a dog die on my hands. It was the neighbor’s dog. She ran it over. She drove very, very slowly, but the dog was old and got tangled up under the wheels of her old, slow car. Something broke and she ultimately suffocated because breathing organs couldn’t work.

We rushed to the vet straight away, she was sort of shocked and didn’t know where to go or what to do, so I jumped in her car immediately and gave her directions to the nearest vet. But only a couple of minutes into the drive, the dog was gone. Her eyes went blurry. I liked that dog. Old granny of a dog. 14 years old. She was always walking so slowly around on our little slow street.

This is the second time in a couple of months that I had an animal die on my hands. A couple of months ago, it was a cat that I managed to pull out of my own dog’s jaws, but too late. My dog is a hunting dog, which was supposed to get executed because it was a bad hunting dog. So we rescued her, took her in. Unfortunately, hunting instincts can’t leave her. So she’s obsessed with cats and tries to kill them - always.

Having an animal die on your hands is very defeating. In particular if you’re trying to help it, if you really don’t want it to die. It’s just nature, telling you - nope. I came to the realization that most deaths are just suffocation. That’s what death is - brain no longer being supplied with oxygen. That’s IT. Isn’t that crazy? You can cause that with tons of different methods, but that is what death is - the lack of oxygen in the brain. There’s more - you could cut some key neurons and that would also be death. But most deaths - including mechanical ones, such as bleeding out or being crushed by something - are just the brain no longer receiving blood with oxygen inside.

Sort of frustrating really. Very bad design. MVP, but with glaring issues that any engineer would be panicked to resolve ASAP. Who doesn’t install a redundancy that takes over the oxygenation of the brain?? Absolutely mental, you’d need to be.

I also got shot at the other day. I heard gunshots in the distance, and then a sizzling, whizzing sound above my head. Apparently hunters have a licence to hunt in the middle of the city, because that area where I was at is classified as a hunting ground.

Nothing more to add, really. Life’s just been weirdly stressful. Not even stressful, but dangerous, and frustrating. I’m not stressed by it. I’m just increasingly frustrated with my inability to make significant change. I’m butting up against the boundaries of the real world - and the real world is difficult. There are some easy hacks here and there - piles of money sitting untouched - but in general, life’s hard.

Our understanding of the world is limited, and our engineering is primitive. In particular biological and medical engineering. Where are exoskeletons? Why can’t I fly yet? Why is it possible that I can easily bleed out if I get shot? Most gunshot deaths aren’t caused by catastrophic organ failure, but by literally bleeding out. Imagine how stupid of a death that is. You’re just leaking fluid. So dumb. How are we not solving this problem? Why is it so hard? Why are we still stuck with the same dumb systems that we’ve been running on for the last hundred thousand years? Am I crazy here for expecting more?

You could spend a lifetime learning a topic, and even if you successfully navigate the intricacies that we create ourselves - the random social labyrinths that we produce - even if you learn random diplomatic skills in addition to the skills that are needed to produce actual change - you’d still be stuck! You’d still need luck to do more than hope for some lasting change. It’s frustrating. We have very bright minds, hundreds of thousands of them, working on pressing issues, and sure we’re improving more and more, but it just feels slow, and hard. We’re surrounded by hard problems.

We’ve come so far. We need to go further. I don’t know if there’s some hidden pool of talent lying around untapped - some hidden source of genius that would solve our problems. Maybe it’s AI, if it doesn’t kill us before it helps us. Maybe it’s the randos on the internet that do bullshit jobs and spend all day tweeting. I don’t know. Maybe there isn’t any easy solution, no magical fountain of problem-solving liquid, and we just need to keep grinding, keep doing what our civilization has been doing for a long time. I suspect that’s the case. I understand then that the skill of “facing immense challenges but still pushing through” is the main skill that I need to respect more and practice more. But today I’m weak, so I admit: I’m frustrated. Life is hard.