A Theory of Everything
A theory of everything, an overarching set of universal laws and equations that can be used to explain any and every little thing from the mundane details of our lives to the greatest mysteries in the universe. A theory of everything is the end product of our boundless human curiosity. Where we, these tiny mammals from a tiny planet in this grand interstellar tapestry finally end our endless quest to figure it all out, once and for all. Never mind what might seem like the impossibility of such a theory coming into being, and overlook for a second the paradox of ending an endless quest, and just think about what the obsession to understanding everything really amounts to. It amounts to understanding the one thing that is utterly and entirely beyond our comprehension, nothing.
While it may be an endearing statement to the human potential that nothing is outside of our grasp, it is just as much a chilling reminder about our deepest fear, that there’s a nothing beyond everything. What we can’t see before everything came to be and what we can’t see when everything comes to an end. So we come up with stories, theories and religions, all to try to explain to ourselves, to fill that void in ourselves that can’t be satisfied without knowing. Whether they be right or wrong, what they are, are our little resistance to accepting oblivion. Our way of defying our fears of turning into nothing by living and loving, and trying to amount to something so that this temporary period of time where the atoms and molecules that make you are held together in the perfect way that makes you, isn’t just an error term at the end of some regression equation. Each of our attempts to know the unknowable, our little shouts into what seems like an endless void. So that maybe, just maybe we may hear something back.
That isn’t a tale about the hopelessness of the futile efforts, the culmination of which is labelled life. In fact that tale is exactly what hope is. It’s the legend of humanity and how in the face of imminent and eternal obscurity, we find that sliver of hope to hold on just a little longer, to love just a little harder and to extend this temporal experience just a little longer. This experience is exactly what makes life worth living, like finding yourself in the middle of a story and then trying to figure out how it begins and how it ends. The only efforts that go futile in that are the ones we we refused to see the meaning, because each of them amount to a tiny peace in trying to figure out the greatest puzzle ever assembled. Each of our grand journeys of trying to figure that out, that’s each of our own theories of nothing.
