Tears in the rain

Roy Batty’s monologue in Blade Runner is like, wow, deep.

But I have been thinking about it lately because that’s the kind of hipster wank I’m into, damn it.

And the guy raises a disturbing point in my mind: if something you experience or absorb in life isn’t shared and passed on, then what’s the fucking point of it?

If you listen to music on your own, if you read a book and don’t have anyone to talk about it with, if you have an amazing dream you can’t describe, then what was that for? It doesn’t seem like a problem until the experience is something that feels like it should be valuable or important. Then it somehow seems like a waste. That’s a weird contradiction; who cares if mundane shit like the porridge you ate for breakfast gets forgotten to the ether of time, but a twelve hour hallucinatory experience in which the space around you becomes a weird conscious kind of fabric observing you and through which you have a number of counter-intuitive metaphysical revelations, that somehow is a huge waste if it then doesn’t become an action or an influence outside of one’s head. Is there then an obligation to do something about apparently meaningful experiences? Is it wrong to become a hermit and no longer have any shared experiences with anyone else?

I guess I don’t like the idea that most of what I really like to do, even when I think I’m not wasting time, is in fact wasting time, and that the main things that matter outside of my own head are actually not very personally rewarding. But I know this is just cliche existential angst and everyone just has to decide whether to be a hedonist and then smokebomb out of the universe leaving not much behind, or whether to put in a more lasting contribution while only being a miniscule stepping stone along the way to an actual result, only ever sampling a tiny slice of the whole. That’s just being a grown up. Still seems like a waste.