I think this poster on NeoGaf summed it up well:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=227281283&postcount=1534
Bobby Roberts:
It's a thing I've been thinking about off and on this afternoon, this "Baby Bust" as people are calling it, and how it really started to kick us all in the chest this year. The sheer number of people born, the rise of our media machine into something altogether different, the way that machine put so many people into our living rooms, the way we latched onto these movie stars, these musicians, these athletes, the way they became the background noise of our childhoods, the fabric of the security blankets we'd tuck up under our chins when life started kicking our ass and we needed to go lay down for a minute to recuperate.
Now they're all leaving, and it's not just the reminder of mortality, because I think most of us know that all things end, eventually, and it's more about what you do with that time, and how you spend it, and who you spend it with. On some level we know it's more about the how of our life than the what.
But David Bowie goes, and Prince goes, and Carrie Fisher goes, and Gene Wilder goes, and Muhammad Ali goes, all these stars winking out one after another, and you can't help but think about your star, and the ones in your orbit.
They're all gonna go. Your mom, your dad, Your sisters & brothers. All of em are gonna go, and it's coming faster than anyone wants, and it's going to hurt goddammit, it's gonna hurt so fucking bad, if these people we've never met are going to affect us this much what's it gonna be like when the people we really know wink out of our sky, right?
They're all gonna go, and despite all our own bullshit, all our stupid baggage, the struggles and the frustrations we all have trying just to maintain in the face of our problems, we owe it to them to take the best parts of them, and incorporate them into ourselves as best we can, and take that into the future, for everyone's sake. We owe it to them. We owe it to us.
That's one hell of a responsibility, ain't it? That shit isn't easy. And this year just won't stop reminding us of all this impermanent beauty and genius. And it's never going to let up as we keep moving forward, either. Who wants to waste all that inspiration? Who wouldn't want to be that inspiration for someone else if they could?
This is what life is, I guess. The absorption and transformation of love, into loss, and back again into more love.
The work is rewarding as hell, but it's never going to get easier. You just hope that when it's your turn for that transformation, you leave behind as much as these people left you.
That's what I've been thinking about this afternoon.
