Supernova (Ink!Sans x Reader)

2. Echoes of Ghosts

When shadows rise and jesters grin, when the wise become fools and the fools gorge themselves in wit, when the kings find themselves peasants and the poor find themselves with power never before acquitted, when the senses have betrayed your sense of reality and reason fails to marry rhyme, then can it be considered the end of time, the passing of one age into the next as is customary.

If you think about it, if you sit down really hard and think about the passage of time and how strange it is, it becomes clear how abstract everything is, how the customs and traditions of our day and age seem rooted in iron and stone, how our lives right now seem like they will always continue as they do now, without any change or conflict.

It is easy to think this way when we have not known any better, when we are two decades or less old and have lived out perhaps only one third of our lives, maybe even less. There is so much that we have yet to learn but it is important to not consider our ignorance of this dynamic world as a bad thing, as some irrefutable flaw that makes the young inferior to the older members of the human race, those who have been around longer and have grown use to change and know it by heart.

It is rooted in many cultures that it is custom to follow the wisdom of the elders, for why should we question the teachings of those who have been around longer than us, the new generation? How can we expect our world view and understanding of reality to compare with those who have seen the sun rise and set thousands of more times than we could ever dare to dream of?

To live one's life with this mentality, to never question or challenge authority, to accept the mentality that the wisest know better than the young, that those in charge ultimately should be in charge, that is what keeps society at a standstill. For if we sit down and allow ourselves to be contented with how things are without wanting to change anything, then our world really will not change.

And maybe that's good if our world doesn't change, if we all sit down and relax and keep things the way they are. In the height of the twenty-first century on this green and blue rock that orbits a rather distant star, we find ourselves in a time period without any conflict, where the world is not at war with itself and the threat of freezing in a nuclear winter is considerably a lesser threat than what it once was.

So why should we want to change anything? Why should we want to question our elders and our authority when everything seems fine right now?

In truth, humans have one flaw. We can surround ourselves with hundreds of people, befriend everyone around us, text and chat with others online for hours on end. But no matter how often we do this, reach out and connect with others, we are always alone, always our consciousness forced to be by itself. We will never know what someone else is thinking, we will never fully understand how people react to varying situations. We are limited in our world view even if we live in a time period at the climax of technology, where seven point six billion people can reach out to one another at the push of a button. We are more connected than ever, but we have never been more alone.

We can only ever really know what we choose to understand, from what we see. We will only ever gather knowledge and understanding about what this world is like through what we observe. You can't hop into someone else's mind and read what they've been through, you can't ever confirm your own life experiences with someone else because our minds, our consciousnesses are trapped behind a few inches of bone.

Because of this limited world view, it is clear then to realise that while the time we live in right now seems peaceful, there are hidden factors, small unknown dangers that are blossoming in this world's current climate, threats that our small vision and understanding of the world cannot begin to comprehend. We live right now in a time where climate change is not a problem, where the rise of the average global temperature is barely felt, so why should we make all these changes, challenge authority and try to reduce our carbon emissions?