Do You Ever Feel Like You've Lived Your Life Before?
I'm open to things being much weirder than we realize because they almost certainly are
Time and time again I’m overcome with the eerie feeling that I’ve lived my life before. It is more than déjà vu, which I also experience quite often. If déjà vu is a beer, this feeling is like several shots of tequila. It’s a feeling that is likely a delusion of some sort, and it scares the hell out of me sometimes, but it is also very interesting.
I don’t think this is actually what’s going on. But if it somehow were—if we really live our lives over and over—it wouldn’t break my brain.
The more time I spend in deep thought, the more I come to the conclusion that pretty much nothing would surprise me about existence. If some form of Buddhism’s or Hinduism’s view of reincarnation, or Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, were in fact shown to be true, I’d just be like, okay. I would still be in absolute awe. I would be thrilled and fascinated and temporarily freaked out by a discovery like that. But I wouldn’t drop dead from shock or completely lose my mind, as I imagine some people would. Everything is just so damn weird to me already!
If any theory or story that defies what we currently know, or seems “out there”—like certain Biblical stories or the idea that aliens helped humans build early civilizations—were somehow revealed to be true, I would definitely be surprised. But is that really that much more insane than even being here in the first place? A consciousness on Earth? My writing this essay and you reading it?
I’m not saying I think any of the theories I mentioned above are true. I don’t think the evidence or rationale is strong or convincing enough. My point is that I’m open to things being much weirder than we realize, because they almost certainly are. Our ignorance remains infinite.
I'm in the same place, and I think a lot of people are. Like anything could happen next and we'd be like, oh yeah, well, doesn't surprise me. Shit's been getting really weird for a while now. Years ago my wife and I were on our back porch in Arizona where you can really see the stars at night. Suddenly there were a few dots of light slowly moving across the sky. Too close together for planes. But then close behind were another dozen dots. And then twenty more, and soon this massively long trail of lights were passing overhead and my wife got genuinely excited, thinking this was finally it, extra-terrestrial beings were on the way in to make themselves seen and known. After 15 minutes of suspended logic I finally looked it up and realized it was Starlink launching a new fleet of satellites. We were very disappointed.