by Juice Box » Fri May 06, 2016 2:28 pm
I went really deep into trying to figure out an answer to what the meaning of existence is, and my current answer is: it doesn't matter. Because even though every single thing in the world matters, nothing matters enough.
And when I say "deep," I mean seriously deep. Lots of discussions with friends and forcing them to give a shit, then staying up at night just thinking.
Now seriously, Newton's Third Law of physics states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. That's true from a purely physics-based perspective, but in real life, tons of things have a distinct snowball effect. Each decision has the capacity to cause a chain reaction of new events, decisions, etc.
The thing that makes humans--living organisms, for that matter--so unique, is their capability to create decisions. These decisions have widely varying effects on the world at large. Imagine this: every single person in the world is a dot, and every single day, you, as a person, create a ripple--your decisions--that effects the course of life and existence of all other dots around you, and each ripple you cause creates yet another ripple, which creates another ripple, and on and on and on.
That's what happens every day, and though most days in our lives are seemingly unremarkable, with no lasting memory made in-between, there can and there will be days when lasting decisions are made. We do not remember days, after all--we remember moments.
But seriously, I cannot stress enough how much a single decision matters. Just think about it: imagine your parents met at their school. What if your mom went to a different school? What if your dad liked a different girl? What if your grandparents broke up before they gave birth to your dad? With all technicality, our very lives are a key impossibility--every single one of us--because there are simply too many decisions and too many possibilities in the world--literally infinite--that the odds of us in particular being born are incredibly low.
This is actually why I think death--especially at a young age--can be one of the most saddening things to ever happen to our world: because of how heavily each decision weighs, when you kill one man, you might actually be killing millions, and affecting the course of billions more. Imagine a family tree that starts with you. Let's say you get married to some girl who despite being beautiful is nowhere near as pretty as me. You have two children. Your two children grow up, get married and have two children each. You now have four grandchildren. Your four grandchildren get married and have two children each. Though you likely won't be alive to tell, you now have eight great-grandchildren. Your eight great-grandchildren get married and have two children each. You now have sixteen great-great-grandchildren. They get kids, too. You now have thirty-two great-great-great-grandchildren. Decades pass and families drift apart. Eventually there will come a time when millions of people trace you back as their ancient ancestor. And yet it still continues on and on and on.
The thing about death, is this: what if your wife died before your children were born? All those millions of people--the possibility of them existing in the future--all of that ceases to exist. When you kill one person, especially a young one, you actually kill millions. Though you're not exactly "killing" them physically, you deny them the possibility of existence, and to deny someone existence is practically the definition of death.
But of course, things aren't that simple. Like I said, every single day, we create decisions--ripples--that affect the course and existence of everyone around us. Everyday, your wife will make decisions that affect you, as a person, and all others around her. When you kill her off--when you remove her dot from the world, you're removing a source of ripples, of daily decisions, and everyone's lives change. The ripples she makes will cease to exist, and the effect of that is so extremely powerful, to the point that the world a thousand years from now, maybe even tens of thousands, would still feel that absence. The possibilities of what her ripples would cause if she existed are absolutely limitless, and killing her removes all those possibilities. In effect, when you kill someone, you effectively change the course of all of humanity forever, removing an infinite list of possibilities and decisions. You might not feel its effects immediately, but give it a few thousand years or so, and it'll be there.
I can't stress this enough: everything we do, every decision we make, literally has the capability to change the world. Everything is connected. Everything we do matters.
That may seem like a hopeful message, but it can't top the meaninglessness of it all. If you look at that Elisa Lam thread I made, one of the fears I stated was, "things not mattering enough." This is what I mean. Although every single thing we do has the capacity to create an infinite impact on the world, no amount of impacts matter enough.
Because the numbers don't lie. You are one person. One person among billions. There are literally nearly a hundred billion dead people in the world. All of them have made decisions and ripples and marks and impacts, just like you. And all of those billions of people are part of only one Earth, which is only one among billions of celestial bodies in a close vicinity around our sun. And our sun is only one among billions (300 billion, if we're going to be specific) of other stars in our galaxy. And our galaxy is only one among billions more in our universe. We don't even know if there's only one universe.
Theoretically, in this world, we are not specks of dust, no, we're much lower than that. We're lesser than atoms, and though each of our movements and thoughts and decisions has the capability to infinitely affect how others around us work, it ultimately doesn't matter. Everything we do is connected, and everything we do matters, but nothing matters enough, and that's the driving point.
Theoretically, though, if we ignore everything else, there are probably only two endings to the story of humanity: either A) we all die, or B) we don't. Maybe the universe we live in will get the better of us, and we die, leaving everything we've ever done and everything we've ever hoped for to dust. But then again maybe we'll kick the universe in the balls, give it the finger and say, "fuck you, man, we're not gonna die." Maybe we'll become something more than human. At the rate we're advancing as a whole, it's easy to say that we'll eventually achieve many impossible things--permanent memory, visiting other planets, immortality... maybe even transcendence. That's all dreaming too far, and we're still too young to say that, but to be honest I'd really rather be on the young side for now, since taking everything I said into account, that's when we'll matter the most.
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