music, books, love and kindness

I re-watched Netflix's Dark in less than two days, during the holiday four-day weekend I had, then I started 12 Monkeys. Both affect me so deeply I struggle with the words to justify just how much I love them. (It still boggles my mind that a show as good as 12 Monkeys debuted on the SyFy Channel…actually, I take that back because I just remembered that that’s the channel Resident Alien debuted on a few years ago and I love that show too).

I have seen Dark multiple times and 12 Monkeys will be my second re-watch. There are so many similarities between the two but the latter is just so underrated it's almost criminal. I feel Dark is more bleak and emotional than 12 Monkeys  and it hits hard with its themes of generational trauma, eternal recurrence and the futility that pervades it.

Eternal Recurrence has fascinated (and terrified) me since I was rather young. I didn't know it was called that at the time, but I remember randomly thinking one day that maybe we just kept living the same exact life over and over and over again.

But looking back at that memory now, I realize it probably wasn't eternal recurrence that had popped into my mind then. With eternal recurrence, you wouldn't be aware of having previously lived the very same exact life. Everything (down to every last thought you have) would eternally recur so you would never actually know you were living the same life repeatedly.

(Speaking of Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence I found myself talking with a customer about him today and it reminded me how much I can have a good day at work and how much I can love my job when I’m with a really nice or engaging customer. We talked for a while and it was just one of the best conversations I’ve had in a long time. I really really really need to remember how much I used to love my job and how much I still can).

Though I am reluctant to use AI for this part (Grok and Gemini each offered horribly wrong facts about the family trees on Dark) I do find this very helpful:

• Exact Repetition: For the recurrence to be eternal and exact, every single atom, event, and thought must repeat in precisely the same order. The first time you experienced a moment, you did not remember a previous life; therefore, in the recurring life, you would also not have that memory.
• No Mechanism for Memory Transfer: The concept, most notably explored by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, is generally presented as a cosmological hypothesis where the universe and all events within it repeat infinitely. It does not involve a soul or consciousness that exists outside of the physical reality of the life cycle, which would be necessary to carry memories from one cycle to the next. Your consciousness is part of the recurring pattern itself.
• The Philosophical Purpose: Nietzsche used the idea as a thought experiment, a "greatest weight" to assess one's affirmation of life. The lack of memory is crucial to this test. If you knew everything was a repeat, you might act differently, which would break the "exact same life" rule. The point is to ask if you would live your current life—with all its joys and sorrows, exactly as it is—over and over again, unknowingly.