What If We Don’t Really Disappear?

What if the people around you aren't just your environment - but the place where you'll continue to live?

Most of us live as if our individual “self” is the whole story.

We keep trying to fill that self with more stimulation, more purchases, more experiences, more pleasure. But the more we try to pack into this narrow sense of “me,” the more quickly the pleasure fades.

There is another possibility.

We can learn to live within our connections with others - this is about moving our attention beyond ourselves and becoming more active in the lives of the people around us.

Take a smartphone for example. When it's disconnected from the network, everything is stored on the device. If the phone breaks or the battery dies, it all disappears.

But when the information is backed up to the cloud, the physical device becomes much less important. The information is part of a larger system.

Maybe our body is the same: just a temporary device.

The deeper question is what we're building within the network of relationships between us.

If, over the course of our lives, we learn to move beyond ourselves and truly live through our connections with others, maybe we're already becoming part of something larger than the individual self.

And maybe when the physical device eventually disappears, we don't disappear with it.

Because we're already in the cloud.