This world doesn't exist anymore

10 Sep, 2025

I was looking up a few favorite episodes in the Futility Closet website when I felt a pang in my heart. It had been many years since I last visited their page--ever since they stopped the podcast (I wanna say, 2019?). I think this, combined with old black and white pics and my post-pandemic broken sense of time made me feel like I was looking through a spyglass into a world that doesn't exist anymore. It's been so long.

I talk a lot about nostalgia on this blog--hell, most of us do. We thrive in early-internet aesthetics, bulky CRT monitors, IRCs, ICQs, MSNs... Many of us live and breathe nostalgia.

But.

We've lived through that. And even if you didn't, you can talk directly to people who did have game cartridges and VHS tapes. Those people in those black and white photos across The Futility Closet's website... They are no more. Nothing living from their world is left. No human voice can share with you what it was like. Those faces lived and died in a reality that was starkly different from ours. They've faded into history.

There's lots of very sad stories too, so I guess that also makes my chest heavier when I scroll through the episodes. A lot of "the last person of indigenous tribe X", or "the horrors this child/extremely vulnerable person endured". Let me be clear: they're not told in a click-baity, disrespectful way, it's just that there's a lot of sadness scattered across history and that's just a fact. (They also have super funny episodes about the wildest cons and hoaxes and liars you can imagine, but of course my heartstrings got struck only by The Sad.)

I feel like the older I get, the less resilient I become to sadness. It's like my heart can't take it. I'll read half a paragraph and spend the next ten years going back to that story and feeling terrible about it. You'd think the more grief and pain you endure in this life, the stronger you become... But in my case, it seems to be the opposite.

We can't change the past. We can barely salvage it. There's no postmortem reparitions we can do to honor the dead and their suffering. Nothing will undo it. Going from a life of pain to inexistence sounds bleak, and it is.

I think the first time I felt like this was at 12 years old, watching for the first time the documentary "Nós que aqui estamos por vós esperamos" (Here We Are Waiting For You, 1999)¹ in class and feeling like I was watching something about life in another planet--which, in a way, it was. We live in such a different reality now--especially us, people with daily access to internet and modern technology. Their world is dead, and so are all those people.

One day, it's gonna be our turn. I wonder what the next world will look like.

#blog #eng #life