The bomb that changed my life (2011)
swombat.com
swombat.com
Living in Peshawar, where bomb blasts are a regular occurrence, you slowly get immune to it. To such an extent that even the media doesn't care (we just had a blast only 2 miles away from my home killing 16 today).
You get to a stage that you just start living in fear. Worrying about your family whenever they go out.
Now after read Daniel's experience, and your comment about Peshawar Neebz, I feel what a terrible place and time I have been born in. Why does all this have to happen? Who is terrorist for whom? And why do innocents have to die or face these experiences at all? For which perhaps only the political leaders are responsible.
[1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-125820/US-bomb-kills...
I wouldn't advise the XIII century. Or most of the XX. Or the 5th BC. Or ...
As a matter of fact, you probably just have "better" news of the world, not objectively worse conditions. There was a post about that recently ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusades
C13 is 1200-1299
(I may have been echoing an old SF story where a XXX century displaced person was telling a friend about his punishment for trying a ruthless power grab, which was being dumped in Warsaw in September 1939. However, he had bounced back, remaking a good life. But the "friend" was an agent who then proceeded to continue the punishment by dumping him in Baghdad before Genghis hit it ...).
Anyways, pick a century, any century ...
http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/014312...
It also doesn't help that a story like the one you posted above, is more "click-worthy" than a story about how someone from the same Boston Bomb blast helped saved people, made tourniquets out of their shorts and shirt, and put their own safety in jeopardy just to help others. I would like to read a story like that; a story that celebrates humans helping other humans in times of tragedy.
Unless it is some chain "status" on Facebook put on by some poster just scraping for likes, only to promote some shitty whatever on their facebook account, feel good stories just aren't as widely circulated as stories that scare people. It sucks.
It doesn't make for a surprising headline. It's almost an expectation of how we expect Pakistan to be.
...And of course /persons from 1st world countries/white people/ aren't dieing. So it won't make the headlines of news sites.
I am just pointing out at first a bomb blast is likely an eye opener: life is short lets do something before I die. But when it happens every week, it goes to the stage where you start thinking you just don't have enough time to do anything.
And the worst (or best?) thing is that we are not living in a war-zone. We actually go to our jobs everyday, attend weddings, go eat in restaurants. I am product lead of a startup here.
It's like living a dual-life.
I have been travelling for 12 years and I really want to spend time with them now. Both are above 60 and this is the ideal time to be with them.
You might ask why they don't just move. That's because the bulk of their life is spent here. There social circle is all based here. It keeps them busy at this age. They visit my siblings in US every year but after a few weeks they get bored. We don't push them because at the end of the day we think it's criminal to move your parents to a totally new place in their age to start a new life all over again. They've worked really hard all their lives, it's time for them to enjoy.
Wow, reading all your comments really puts things into perspective. How you are able to, in some way, possibly risk your own safety just to be with your parents and other immediate members of your family, truly speaks in great lengths about who you are and your character as a whole.
Keep doing your thing. The world needs more people like you.
I have met very few people who live their lives the same way (many claim to, or even do when it's the easy path, but stray when it's not) and there are many people who have similar experiences but go on to just live in fear, or eventually put it to the back of their minds. Everyone, death is inevitable (even if we somehow achieve immortality, there's the heat death of the universe). No matter how long or short your life is, you decide where it goes and you are the judge of the quality of how you lived that life.
By pure chance I was not at my usual spectator spot at the marathon yesterday for the first time in 4 years: in front of the storefront where the first bomb went off.
It's all thanks to pure happenstance: for the first time in years I am no longer a remote worker; the company that acquired my startup last fall has offices in the suburbs and I am not yet past the 6 month moratorium on taking vacation days.
The unlikely series of events that led to me not being present until about 30 minutes after the blasts is something I am still coming to terms with. I almost don't have time to...my building is still under armed lockdown because I live a mere block from the scene. I dread having to walk that route someday soon.
Still, I hate the company that acquired my startup, even if the acquisition potentially saved me grave injury. I think it's past time I quit, instead of just complaining about it and hoping for dividends.
I had a similar experience where I was almost T-Boned by a Semi Truck that ran a red light when I was 18 after I just graduated from High School (I am 21 now). It made me realize what I want to do, and is perhaps one of the best things that could have happened to me in its own morbid way.
You'll be fine. Talk to your friends and family when you feel like you aren't. In the end, you will be fine.
I am relatively certain that I won't be fearful (or at least I hope so). I just hope passing by the scene will not cause an emotional response that I can't hold back. Most weeks I pass by the spot a dozen times or more, and I don't want to unconsciously play a game of "what if" every time I'm there.
It takes time. The "what if" feeling is an awkward one to deal with - but instead of worrying, live life to the fullest. That "what if" will always be there for so many other reasons.
A life lived doing what makes you happy is a good thing. I realized that later in life than I should have.
I'm happy to say that my friends in the area were okay as well.
My advice in your situation would be: don't rush it. There's plenty of time to make these decisions when you are not shell-shocked. The important thing is the insight, the change of perspective. The decisions will follow naturally, but no need to make them while you're still dazed and confused.
A week or a month won't make that much difference to your decision - but they will mean that when you look back at it a year later, it won't be with the feeling that perhaps you rushed the decision.
Conveys the harsh cold ground reality of a bomb blast. I lost a good friend in the German Bakery bomb blasts that struck Pune, India in 2010 and this story made me well up. We are all just meat bags held up with a few bones and an explosion is capable of ending all the life we have spent years building around ourselves and our loved ones. Terrorists truly suck.
Sorry for the loss of your friend.
If you are going to deconstruct that way, why stop there, why not bags of water? Or a random assortment of atoms?
By that reasoning a work of art is just random colors and there is no reason to admire it.
But in actuality the whole is greater than the parts, and that applies to people too.
I disagree. There is no conflict between admiring the organization of the fundamental particles and realizing that stuff is ultimately just big collections of fundamental particles.
By that measure every single thing that exists is exactly identical to everything else. If nothing is different, then nothing matters, and nothing has value.
Let's just short circuit that entire pointless line of thought and look at the whole, not just the parts.
"By that measure every single thing that exists is exactly identical to everything else."
Where do you get this idea? "X is ultimately just a big collection of fundamental particles" and "Y is ultimately just a big collection of fundamental particles" does not imply "X is identical to Y".
It's like saying you should never call anybody a "person" because you're implying all people are identical. I mean, what?
Doing so hardly means that one considers all such systems equivalent or indeed that one doesn't think of a reductionist view as just the most reified (though pretty damned vague) possible view of the system.
If you're thinking about, say, crowd reactions, then you don't want the "meatbag" model. Instead, you need a higher-level psychological model. However, if your problem is "what kind of injuries result from a bomb", then the "meatbag" model is right on.
Thinking of the body as a loose confederation of fundamental particles is fairly useless when trying to decide how much to charge for a product, but it's an excellent model when e.g. figuring out how much radiation a person will absorb from a source.
No layer denies the usefulness or reality of any of the others.
It was your use of the word "ultimately" that I objected to.
| why not bags of water
Silly nerd thinking. Your "meat bag" and "meat space" thinking is ridiculous.
Does not follow, and I disagree strongly. Specifics matter, but that doesn't make the "meat bag" thing untrue.
If everything is true then nothing is. If you want to compare a person to a meat bag, then you also have to compare them to a block of wood, and the sun, and everything else. i.e. you've actually done nothing whatsoever.
matter
/ | \
meat wood ...
/ \ \
human cow ...
As far as I can tell, the point of describing humans as meat is not to make an assessment of worth, but rather to drive home the fragile and temporary nature of humans. I don't know why anyone would object to that.
The fragility angle was obvious in his post, but people clearly just needed to be butthurt over something.
Nobody's suggesting what you're saying but you. If you're incapable of comprehending written English then you probably shouldn't be reading these comments.
I simultaneously believe that humans are made of meat and that the loss of a human is tragic. You are in absolutely no place to tell me that I don't think the second because I think the first.
Edit: Also, "meatspace" generally is just shorthand for "life away from the computer. not 'cyberspace'" The term "real life" could be used, though many find the implication of that to be very silly for obvious reasons.
"We are all just meat bags ..."
If you told someone that their son was "just a meat bag," or if you were speaking on your behalf in court and stated you were "making an appearance in meat space," you would be naturally considered a sociopath.
So get real.
It's the nerd group-think reductionist tendency on the internet. They wouldn't get away with it in real life for long if they valued having friends.
You can choose to sound like the atheistic Colombine murderers and their ilk, but don't expect the less numbed to not call you out on it.
Holy shit. Nice troll.
I should have guessed a real conversation wasn't your goal when you started out with insults. My fault really.
http://www.deathdyinggriefandmourning.com/Death-Dying-Grief-...
I agree that if someone went to the trouble of writing and sharing their experiences, being touched/affected by it is a complement to the person.
I think there's a pretty thick line to be drawn between being fascinated by accounts like this one, shared willingly, and being obsessed by reading or viewing accounts extracted from people by the media, sometimes against their will or understanding... One is voyeurism, the other is just learning about someone's experience from them...
I've met a couple of people who did "look to the right", so to speak, and your decision not to look should be right up there with the best decisions you've ever made.
It's one of those strange things when the impulse decision to limit experience, rather than expand it, seems to have been the right one. Sometimes it's better to be conservative. Some part of my brain was seemingly functioning well enough to protect me from myself there. I did not know anything about PTSD at the time, and thankfully I still have no first-hand experience of it, but from what I've read about it that would have been a perfect occasion to inflict that on myself for no good reason... So yes, I'm pretty happy about that decision too...!
If you have yet to read this, I thoroughly recommend you do.