Our Life’s Work

Creating disruptive change, making a dent in the universe, and always shoot for the stars. These phrases often represent and accompany the lofty goals we aspire to in our work.

Let us start with the premise that all our work carries merit with different values. Each individual subjectively assigns this value. However, these individuals form a collective where there is a common wavelength of shared ideals as to what constitutes the most important work. This type of work revolves around a singular idea: furthering the cause and purpose of humanity. In more abstract terms, the self preservation of an organism.

Is furthering humanity really a worthy goal? It depends on who you ask but to me it seems so. If we are in fact a rare anomaly in the vast empty universe that has become self aware of it’s existence and mortality, don’t we have the responsibility to keep creating more of us until we can “figure it all out”? We don’t live on a magnitude of time large enough to really ponder and work through interesting problems that approach infinity yet we have managed to do so iteratively. Ever since we were able to effectively make our thoughts outlast our bodies.

Each new generation brings new insights. That old saying of standing on the shoulders of giants never seemed more apt. But no matter how hard we try the big picture seems to elude us. Whether we go deeper down atomically or peer out into the stars; we keep finding more. A Matryoshka doll of discovery that never quite ends.

As an individual how do you measure your life’s worth without feeling like an inconsequential cog in the Rube Goldberg machine of existence? In the history of everything there will be no single individual championed as the one, the most important human being. It is always the collective human race that will receive the credit. Although, there are those among us who will shine brighter and show up as blips that pointed the arrow of humanity in a specific direction. Maybe the highest honor we can afford is to be one those blips, the few of the many that register a spike in the infinite graph of time that no one will ever completely see.