I WOULD HATE TO BE…

A goldfish. I have a goldfish swimming around in a bowl just a couple feet from me. Well rather than swim it’s more like drifting about and vacantly goggling at its distorted surrondings, but anyways. (Actually now it’s kind of freakin me out by sitting at the bottom of the bowl…how does a goldfish even manage to sit at the bottom of a bowl?!).

In the eyes of humans, especially the smallish ones with eternal sticky stains on their mouths and missing front teeth, goldfish aren’t even living organisms anymore. I even forgot that goldfish had the ability to reproduce…I had had the vague idea that they popped out of the walls of Walmart tanks or some such non-organic method of reproduction. Right now I’m watching my goldfish sleep, and it’s so awkward because I never thought about goldfish sleeping before. Don’t they just hover around until the next time you feed them?

See, this is why I would hate to be a goldfish. No one would value me for ME; I’d be just another prize at state fair or some little kid’s appeasement to his or her constant demands for “Nemo“. I would be a three week replacement until my poor little fish body wouldn’t be able to handle the stress of constant bag-shaking, glass-tapping, “FISHIE WAKE UP“-ing and pass over to Goldfish Heaven, presumably some sort of divine Japanese koi pond. (But I digress. As always.)

Goldfish are so disposable and no one even cares. Does something have a life if no one values it? So some sort of biology nerd could be like “Well, it’s breathing and eating isn’t? It’s heart is beating, isn’t? It’s excreting long strands of poo, isn’t it? Then of course it’s alive you dumb*** next question please!” Well shut up, that’s not the point. It’s kind of like that paradoxical riddle everyone asks: If a tree in the forest falls and no one hears it, does it make a sound? So I must ask the question again: If someone exists and no one really cares, is he/she really living?

In AP world history, I learned that the religion of the first agricultural settlers in the Yellow River Valley (China, for the history/geography incompetent ones out there) was based around ancestor worship. This tradition can still be seen in Confucianism today. Basically, their version of the afterlife was a vague sort of spirit world, where the souls of the deceased hung around in. Here’s the catch: The spirits of the deceased only remained in the spirit world for as long as their descendents remembered them. Once the descendants forgot about their greatgreatgreatgreatgreatgreat-grandfather who got lost somewhere in the family tree, his spirit would vanish forever. I don’t know about anyone else, but the thought of that made me a little sad. And I realized that that religion really reflected the basically psychology of us humans: our lives are made up of other people and our relationships with those people. Of course, above all people you need to value YOURSELF the most, self-confidence is extremelly important, but really…I don’t think I would be able to value myself if I knew that no one cared about me at all.

And now writing this blog post has made me really thankful for all the people who do care about me, my existence. My family, my friends, my teachers…I don’t need to the whole world to care about me. Because the people who do care about me care about me A LOT. Thanks everyone<3 I care about you too!

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And what the hell, I think my fish just ate it’s own poo. -_- lolol nasty creature.