A mere speck in time
Of the few 13 something billion years that the universe we have known has been around, life has existed for about a quarter, definitely no more than a third by even the most liberal estimates. If all of the universe’s timeline is shrunk to a 24-hour scale, most human activities happened in the last minute. Statisticians would call it insignificant, mathematicians would look at the events and deem these improbable, and scientists are still puzzled about several basic WHYs. In some sense, even the most respected fields are human self-narratives. Logic, for instance, is a human construct. So is time as a measure. These things simply don’t exist is other beings. These are mere justifications.
In a century almost everyone would we know would be dead. In a few millennia, most celebs would be forgotten. Give it another factor of 10 and every accomplishment of the day would look silly to our successors if we somehow manage to avoid extinction. If you think about it, at a macro scale, human evolution and survival is a matter of chance and all our combined efforts are futile. At a micro level, you are free to tell yourself any story. The study of causality is also a human construct. Weather, viruses, topographical politics, earthquakes, and other random events that can be deemed as ‘Acts of God’ as the insurance industry puts it. There, I took away your illusion of control but as always open to hearing arguments against this line of thought.
Off related, just learned that walking down the road with a spoon in one hand and half hemisphere of a watermelon in the other, scraping scoops straight from the gigantic fruit is bad-ass enough to enforce social distancing even from the quirkiest teens. Try that sometime… and of course, enjoy the walk while it lasts.
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