What is the meaning of life?
No wait, don't tell me. I know this one.
If anyone ever asked, I would say that there is no such meaning. Each one of us is here because we happened to be born, because there's this random speck of rock floating out in space with even tinier specks crawling around all over it, some of which happen to call themselves people and one of which happens to be me. I. It's astounding, and incredibly depressing, that everything I consider myself, my personality and opinions and dreams- my soul- is so minuscule as to be completely insignificant, the feeling of consciousness an illusion of chemical reactions and firing neurons. Whenever I'm reminded of this bleak viewpoint, I can't help but feel a kind of desperate anxiety arising in me, like a little seed of existential anguish at the top of my spine spreading roots inside me, wrapping tight around my brain and running along every nerve.
I have just read a continuous stream of Psychology Today articles, many of which were about evolutionary psychology, which is basically the idea that all of who we are arises from the biological impulses our ancestors found useful for reproduction and stems from our one goal as living machines to spread our genes and continue the species. This viewpoint is also extremely depressing in large doses, such as when reading article after article breaking down our society, leaders, and individual psyche into basic animal urges motivated almost entirely by sex. It's incredible, and eye-opening, and very, very depressing.
I've spent far too much of my short life wallowing in existential depression, unable to motivate myself to seek happiness, as temporary and useless as it is, or achieve anything beyond the minimum of society's expectations for someone like me. I thought my nihilism had made me somehow superior to my peers, stressing about tests and grades and other inconsequential worries. I felt no such stress, only despair. I thought it was good.
But then I realized something. Even though we are nothing, and everything we do is nothing, it's not healthy to tell ourselves that regularly. I realized the value of simply letting yourself be happy. I realized that often we need to tell ourselves lies to keep from curling up in a dark corner from the meaninglessness of it all. A little illusion and conceit is good for you. And so, instead of my usual depressive ramblings about how damn pointless life is, today I shall write of reasons we are all actually quite important, or at least reasons we should tell ourselves we are.
One. While we are all infinitesimally small in comparison to the scope of the universe, we are also similarly large in comparison to the particles from which we are made. There are
No wait, don't tell me. I know this one.
If anyone ever asked, I would say that there is no such meaning. Each one of us is here because we happened to be born, because there's this random speck of rock floating out in space with even tinier specks crawling around all over it, some of which happen to call themselves people and one of which happens to be me. I. It's astounding, and incredibly depressing, that everything I consider myself, my personality and opinions and dreams- my soul- is so minuscule as to be completely insignificant, the feeling of consciousness an illusion of chemical reactions and firing neurons. Whenever I'm reminded of this bleak viewpoint, I can't help but feel a kind of desperate anxiety arising in me, like a little seed of existential anguish at the top of my spine spreading roots inside me, wrapping tight around my brain and running along every nerve.
I have just read a continuous stream of Psychology Today articles, many of which were about evolutionary psychology, which is basically the idea that all of who we are arises from the biological impulses our ancestors found useful for reproduction and stems from our one goal as living machines to spread our genes and continue the species. This viewpoint is also extremely depressing in large doses, such as when reading article after article breaking down our society, leaders, and individual psyche into basic animal urges motivated almost entirely by sex. It's incredible, and eye-opening, and very, very depressing.
I've spent far too much of my short life wallowing in existential depression, unable to motivate myself to seek happiness, as temporary and useless as it is, or achieve anything beyond the minimum of society's expectations for someone like me. I thought my nihilism had made me somehow superior to my peers, stressing about tests and grades and other inconsequential worries. I felt no such stress, only despair. I thought it was good.
But then I realized something. Even though we are nothing, and everything we do is nothing, it's not healthy to tell ourselves that regularly. I realized the value of simply letting yourself be happy. I realized that often we need to tell ourselves lies to keep from curling up in a dark corner from the meaninglessness of it all. A little illusion and conceit is good for you. And so, instead of my usual depressive ramblings about how damn pointless life is, today I shall write of reasons we are all actually quite important, or at least reasons we should tell ourselves we are.
One. While we are all infinitesimally small in comparison to the scope of the universe, we are also similarly large in comparison to the particles from which we are made. There are
