A week ago, a member of the facilities staff on campus found a dead body in a classroom. They were alone. The circumstances of their death remain unclear, but word of mouth suggests it was drug-related. Everyone was shocked to hear about it. Such a scary and sad thing happening on campus is rare, and it was pretty discomforting to hear about. I'll be honest, though; death, at least as a concept, doesn't scare me. I don't want to sound naive, given I'm still basically a kid, but I feel like I've already accepted that I'm going to die someday. I've accepted that I can't predict when that will be, nor the manner of it. I try to be death-positive.

As far as I can tell, death positivity is sort of an offshoot of absurdism. I'm not going to act like I know everything about these philosophical concepts. I mean, I'm not a philosophy major, so they're probably too high-level for me to fully understand. But absurdism, as I understand it, is pretty great. It posits that life probably doesn't have inherent meaning, there may or may not be a God, and there may or may not be an afterlife. It's the acceptance that everything doesn't happen for a reason. I find it to be particularly relevant to death.

You know how when someone dies young, bitches will try to comfort the bereaved by saying shit like, "Everything happens for a reason," or worse, "It's part of God's plan?" Yeah, I hate the idea that everything is predetermined somehow. First of all, it doesn't really make any sense if you don't explicitly believe in God. Without him, who makes the decisions? Worse still is the idea that there's a reason for everything. Cause and effect, sure, but a reason? What reason could there be for, say, a ten-year-old kid dying of cancer? Are we God's Sims to drown in fenced-in pools? Reasons can be bad just as they can be good—would the reason for death and despair just God's holy sadism?

It's just not an appealing belief, so I don't believe it. I am perfectly content to accept that we're here on Earth for no reason at all. Given all we know about the universe, it makes sense! The planet happened to orbit the sun at a distance optimal to supporting life, life happened to form, and humans happened to evolve. I don't know why it's so hard for people to reckon with that.