When one lives alone, as well as enjoys a life unencumbered by the dynamics of a romantic relationship, it is very easy to see the animality that undergirds all our actions. We are creatures ruled by appetite. This simple truth is somehow obscured when in the company of others. It must have something to do with projection, how our ability to communicate and cooperate provides an ideational curtain on the
id; hence, metaphysics, not in the traditional Aristotelian sense of a study of the ultimate nature of reality, but metaphysics in the
literal sense of "after physics."
Today is the the first day of winter. Last Saturday I woke up with the worried thought that my waning testosterone is being depleted all the more rapidly due to the environment at work. The overwhelming majority of my coworkers are post-menopausal women. There are only two young women. Haven't there been
studies done that show that men frequently around children have lower testosterone levels? Well, I'm throwing it out there that for a guy to be around a bevy of non-fertile females his testosterone is going to take a hit. Which all in all shouldn't be a big deal, it is just that I'm pushing 50, an age when the loss of muscle mass and stamina becomes apparent.
This worry from last weekend was coupled with a workweek epiphany that went something like this:
We are just animals. And you know what happens to animals? They die.
We mistake consciousness, which is collective, with our individual identity, which we cannot imagine life without.
But it will disappear. Not to worry though. Identity is not identical to consciousness.
When we die and lose our identity this does not necessarily entail a lose of consciousness.
It should be interesting.
