Life Just Went On

thethemeis: What Happened Next

theauthoris: Aaron Twentythree

   What happened next is that life just... went on. Despite everyone's flapping, despite all those so highly strung, despite everything that was intended to go so catastrophically wrong and all the contingency plans that had been conceived to mitigate it all, an eternity more of mundaneness just happened.

   The weather got worse, and then it got better. It got hotter, then it got colder, then it started again. Global warming didn't cook us all, nor did global cooling turn us to tormented stalagmites, forever frozen in an expression of terrified bewilderment. Aliens never visited, animals never grew intelligent enough to take over, and Jurassic Park never became a prophetic masterpiece. Religion didn't die out, but nor did it grow. Everything just hobbled along as it had done before.

   Gay marriage was legalised. And after that, no one who was heterosexual before suddenly became gay. No kids suddenly switched, and nor were "family values" eroded. People just lived, and they lived happily. People who were oppressed were not so oppressed anymore, and on the whole everyone went on with their lives just the same. Some people continued to be phobic, but that was mainly those too unintelligent to even be worth listening to.

   Microsoft didn't go out of business when the next version of Windows came out. All those predictions of public disgust and destruction of a behemoth technology company turned out to be just the ravings of obsessive lunatics. In actuality, critics hailed it as the best operating system ever installed onto tablet computers. It never beat the iPad in terms of commercial success, but by then nothing could. PlayStation kept grappling with XBox, Google kept on wrestling Bing, Coke stayed better than Pepsi, the East and the West continued to bicker, capitalism and communism each held on to their delusional followers, history continued to rewrite itself onto the future. 

   Tax loopholes were never closed. The rich continued to pay the same amounts as the poor, sometimes even less. The poor continued to wish they were rich, so that they could avoid tax too. Questionable expenses continued to be put through and approved by everyone with any authority working for any organisation with spendable budget, and no rules against any of it were ever paid any attention. Money became valuable, then it became worthless, then the next day it happened again. 

   The unintelligent continued to buy terrible literature, as did the intelligent. The smart bought as much printed slush as the stupid, and the thick bought as many masterpieces as did the clever. The best sellers continued to be only those novels that had started out as terrible fanfiction and ended up as terrible books, or else those novels that had just been released as major motion pictures or HBO TV series. The same old artists exhibited their paintings year after year, the same old critics complained that art wasn't art anymore, and the same old punters handed over their money to be in the middle of it all. Exactly the same could be said of any creative industry - nothing ever changed in the world of film, music or advertising to bring the human race to its knees, despite the warnings that it would. 

   Planes continued to take off and land, cars continued to pull off and park, and trains carried on stopping at stations and choo-choo-chooing between them. When they went wrong, nothing really changed. Problems were dealt with. People managed.

   The same scientific discoveries were made every year. Cancer and AIDS were never cured, but nor did they wipe out the human race. We learnt just as much about our universe as we forgot about ourselves; then we studied ourselves and forgot the universe, until it all balanced out. Some people forever cared more about hair gel than they did about DNA, and others eternally concerned themselves with dark matter, rather than KY Jelly.

   Football teams went up, and football teams went down. Basketball teams won, and basketball teams lost. Athletes rose, set world records, and then fell. Fans followed sport more obsessively than they loved their spouses, even though it still made no tangible impact on their day-to-day lives. For every team that fell from grace, another stepped up to take its place. 

   No teenage boy's life ended because he split up with his girlfriend. No female died of loneliness. The most romantic man never walked the earth, and nor did the swooningest woman. People lived, people died, people loved, people laughed, people danced and ran and cried and hated each other and created and destroyed, and none of them was any better or worse than any other.

   And so it continued.

   What happened next is that the everything stayed exactly the same. Forever more, planet Earth silently strived to convince the human race that the devastating endings they dreamed up for themselves were just make believe. It continued to turn, and they continued to ignore it. So fixated were they on panicking themselves with fictions of terrible pandemics and monopolies and injustices that they missed the lasting, glaring, obvious fact: life always has, and always will, go on; and the best way to endure it will forever be to enjoy it.