Rika’s edit: This is not really an article, it’s Nero/whatever his new username is/DarkprinceofAwesome’s rather dark take on the future.

The future is a giant pot of boiling fear and hate. It is the only thing keeping us hanging on to any last shred of hope, no matter how small. It’s what makes us pray to something larger than us. It is the first and last frontier. The future is us.

When we think of the future in its entirety, we coil inward like a snake posed to strike. The fear we feel of something black and vast, unfeeling, the fear we feel of time, that it might swoop in and out of our defenseless lives and take with it everything we hold dear is just too frightening an idea to bear on our own. We hold the ones we love tighter, pull them closer when we think about the untamed future.
It makes us hate that which we thought we couldn’t live without. The fact that we are so vulnerable in comparison to the legacy we’ll leave behind, the memories of our greatness or our faults, the inspiration we’ll cause when we leave this world, or else the relief Earth will feel when we depart, is one of the most unbearable thoughts that can collide with a man’s mind. That’s why we turn to the others, those that don’t feel the way we feel, those who are carefree. We harry and hassle them with our thoughts, infect them with our despair, plague their every breath until they finally feel the hate that we’ve been forced to live with for so long.
The future is such a terrifying prospect that we need to have something to see, something to provide ourselves with to replace the bleak emptiness we see when tomorrow is mentioned. Hope is our invention, not an emotion. Hope is a desparate attempt to sway Fate’s decisions, our petty attempts to look so digustingly pitiful in Her beautiful eyes that perhaps She’ll change her mind, maybe they won’t have to die, maybe that bus driver will go to sleep early so he doesn’t crash the next day, and maybe she won’t have to leave.
The future is man’s greatest fear. Something that can outlive yourself and attack your children and wife, or husband, your family and friends when it’s too late for you to do anything can’t possibly exist. Can it? Does Man live with this infernal nemesis every day of his life? Isn’t it this exact thing that people have been trying to defeat or circumvent for their entire lives, until it was more obsession than hobby? The future is this enemy.
Yet, the future rests more inside us than anything else. The future can dwell nowhere else but in our souls. Perhaps this is the reason that we all feel a collective jolt and slip our hands into our friends’ to comfort both them and ourselves. The very thing that is destroying peoples’ minds is living in them. It’s not a distant, outside force to be feared. It is a part of us, just as much ours as the heart that beats the rhythm of our lives.“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” -Franklin Delano Roosevelt