What is ‘Life’ About?
It’s pointless, really, so the choices are truly yours
I loved the summation offered up by an author of a post on writing dependency managers, found on HackerNews:
Our lives are meaningless perturbations in a swirling vortex of chaos and entropy.
This realisation releases you from the overwhelming, overbearing responsibility you may feel of “making it count”. No matter how much your impact is, or isn’t, your life will just be another ripple in the chaos of the universe. At best, your ripple will cause a few more ripples in “human minds”, which are nothing more than ephemeral electrical impulses stored in and triggered by grooves in an incredibly fragile and even more ephemeral arrangement of complex Carbon based molecules that are just begging to be disrupted and destroyed.
This is not to say that the pursuit of impact is pointless or not recommended. In fact, this discovery to me suggests that there are very few “boundaries” indeed. Struggle stemming from boldness of action and decision is something not to be feared but embraced. After all, it’s just going to be sub ripples within ripples, and whether those are Pleasurable or Painful is just an interpretation of your own feeble mind.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that one should go on a quest of seeking to maximise pain either (unless you have a point to make around that to your fellow ephemerals or to your”self”). Just means that a lot of what is perceived as “pain”, aka economic hardship or social non acceptance, doesn’t matter as much as you think.
But what is “life”?
Go watch this video by Kurzgesagt. I’ll wait.
Back? As you might now agree, at a molecular level, “life” is a series of molecules that is determined to invest energy into creating “order” — anti-chaos. Life is the culmination of random arrangements of molecules in the universe that arised out of pure coincidence to oppose the entropy surrounding it.
Or, as the physicist Erwin Schrödinger had allegedly stated so eloquently:
Living things avoid decay into disorder and equilibrium.
Then, what is my purpose?
Following from the above arguments, at a primal level — indeed at a molecular level — we are about opposing the status quo around us and injecting our own definition of order into the universe around us. This can go anyway you choose. For an Anarchist, the lack of any authoritarian structure is “true order”. For an Authoritarian, it’s the reverse. For a businessperson, it’s the climbing of a profit graph. For a heartbroken teenager, it’s the acceptance of her love.
Any individual’s purpose, then, is to find the status quo that they believe to be most disgusting — then fight that to inject their own version of “order” into it. Truly, this is the pursuit that transcends all mundane emotion of the daily human experience. This is what can keep you awake at night, alert and ready for more, even in a period of duress. This pursuit, even when partially achieved, is what grants the most sublime of all pleasures to the human mind — peace with oneself.
It is time
Go now. Find out what bothers you. If nothing bothers you at that primal level yet, talk to many people. Go to many places, experience many things. Repeat, until you find what it is. The time, place, number of individuals affected, field in which the problem exists — none of these things matter, only the discovery of what resonates with you, does. Then, exert your will and your energy against it until you succeed or you die — you will be nagged by a fear of irrelevance until this begins. Godspeed.
