Kirks Championships : Boxing Prediction League : 2018

I apologize if this bums anyone out in advance.

Just an observation/rumination here....

Most relatively normal people are affected by the death of someone close to them pretty severely, and by those they may have known peripherally, with varying degrees of sorrow depending on their closeness. One way or the other, we're all effected by the death's of those near and dear and of passing acquaintances. Every single loss we experience, takes another chunk of our heart and in time we grow numb, eventually we harden ourselves to the point where whatever is left of our hearts is usually made up of metaphorical deadened scar tissue, and we can almost no longer feel anything at all, which in turn effects us psychologically, because we're angry at ourselves for not reacting to a significant loss as adequately as we should.

But my real point is, as a society we're dealing with a phenomenon that no one before the dawn of the 20th century had to deal with. The steady almost non stop massacre of every one and thing that we hold dear in the public arena, that we don't personally know. Every actor, boxer, athlete, musician, politician, cultural icon will die and are dying on a daily basis, some far too young. But here's the catch, logically and consciously you know very well that they are not related to you, so in theory you should be able to cope with that with far more ease than when someone close to you dies. But deep down in your id, in your subconscious mind, you don't really know the difference, it literally doesn't have the ability to differentiate the two, so you're experiencing the death of a celebrity to an almost equal extent as you'd experience the death of an acquaintance.

Think about it, collectively countries have gone through periods of mass mourning, some bordering on group psychosis after the death of a leader, a President or a Princess or even significant members of your local community, that's accompanied by wailing and screaming, true genuine soul shattering pain. That pain is massively amplified when its a national tragedy like a hurricane or earthquake, especially when you view it o television in all of its graphic horrifyingly painful detail.

So while you may fortunately only experience the deaths of 30 maybe 40 or 50 people who are close to you over a lifetime, the reality is, your subconscious mind is processing everyone you know, both personally or celebrities you admire from afar exactly the same. Because like your family and friends, you have detailed memories of most of them. Then when add in all of the school shootings, terror attacks, natural disasters and their aftermaths, Imagine what kind of psychological effect that has on you? Its overwhelming, and ultimately short circuiting, because you get so enured to it that your mind literally has to shut that part of your mind down, so you can cope from day to day without completely crumbling.

That in my opinion may explain why in a world where... in theory everyone should be happier than they've ever been, that our society has become so detached, so uncaring, so unfeeling, so depressed, so overwhelmed and so numb to the pain and suffering of others, often times from a young age. With our celebrity driven culture, this will never end, and sadly is the new normal. From here on out because of our connection to everyone and everything due to technology, we will be faced with an exponential number of non stop tragedies that will end up possibly ruining the psyches of everyone on planet earth, leaving us all in a depressed and disconnected state, constantly being overwhelmed by an unending fog of soul crushing loss fatigue.

 

Yeah, I'm not like that at all. I look at death fairly logically, but I'm deeply effected by it regardless, I usually repress the hell out of my feelings and try to sort them out and make sense of them incrementally, until I figure them all out, I'm due fr at least one or two outbursts of tears, and then I try to compartmentalize it away. As far as what I'm saying about celebrities, I don't mean we all cry and blubber and take their deaths as hard as a close family member, but they have an effect regardless, a low level one, that our subconscious mind processes like the death of an acquaintance, so we rack up 1000's of deaths deep in there somewhere that we process as a friend or family member regardless. The steady drip drop of bad news, takes its toll, and leaves us emotionally exhausted.

And yeah, how uplifting.

 

There's been a handful that I took pretty hard, James Gandolfini, Harold Ramis, Bill Paxton, John Candy, Peter Steele, Ronnie James Dio, George Romero, Chris Benoit, Roddy Piper, Siskel & Ebert, JFK Jr., Princess Diana, Anna Nicole Smith, Whitney Houston, John Ritter and Patrick Swayze all got to me for various reasons.