The northlondonhippy

Have you ever won­dered where you come from and how you got here?

I have and con­tinue to do so, con­stantly. Some­times it dri­ves me kind of nuts.

And I don’t mean me, per­son­ally. I know how I got here. When a man loves a woman, they do the mummy and daddy dance and nine months later there you are, or a lit­tle less than eight months in my case.

No, I’m talk­ing about more than just me, or you or all of us or even our lit­tle blue planet, but all of exis­tence, the known uni­verse and beyond.

Not that much of the uni­verse is really known, very lit­tle in actual fact. Most of what we think we know about what’s out there in deep space is the­ory accepted as fact.

Did you know that we only found the first planet out­side of our solar sys­tem in 1995 and to date, only 407 of them have been iden­ti­fied? Wikipedia knows all.

Don’t you find that sur­pris­ing, when you’ve prob­a­bly been taught that the uni­verse is full of bil­lions of plan­ets. Again, the­ory accepted as fact. Remem­ber, its only 15 years ago since we found that first planet, prob­a­bly about as long as mobile phones have been in wide usage. That’s not very long at all.

The point is, they are using a the­ory to map out these plan­ets. They aren’t really map­ping them so much as pre­dict­ing and describ­ing what and where they think they are, based on sci­en­tific sup­po­si­tion. They haven’t seen a sin­gle one of them through a tele­scope, because one of such power is yet to exist.

I’m not try­ing to call any of this into ques­tion and one day I expect they will prove they’ve found plan­ets out­side of our solar sys­tem, but I am using it to illus­trate some­thing much more fun­da­men­tal; our knowl­edge of exis­tence is infin­i­tes­i­mally small and as a race we remain in our infancy.

If you think the uni­verse was cre­ated by some all know­ing, all pow­er­ful god and you’re ok with that, this piece prob­a­bly isn’t for you.

I wish it was that sim­ple, to just have faith that a high power put me here for some pur­pose, but I can’t buy into any of that.

If it works for you, great. may your life always be just as free of com­plex­ity and curios­ity. I cer­tainly wish mine was sometimes.

But its not, and I try to move beyond my ques­tions by accept­ing that these answers are unob­tain­able, by me, by you, by every human being who has ever existed or will exist and asked these questions.

Intel­lec­tu­ally I under­stand that these ques­tions won’t ever be answered to my sat­is­fac­tion, but I can’t help con­tin­u­ing to crave the answers. Our knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence is far too lim­ited and our brains far too tiny and use­less to come up with any plau­si­ble expla­na­tions for any­thing that matters.

Its not fair that we can ask these ques­tions, but are unable to ever know the answers. And that’s my pre­dic­tion, that for as long as our species exists, peo­ple will con­tinue to seek answers that will never, ever come.

Think about that, no mat­ter how many gen­er­a­tions fol­low ours, for how­ever many mil­len­nia, we won’t get the answers the most fun­da­men­tal ques­tions con­cern­ing the ori­gins and pur­pose of all of existence.

Now I am try­ing to move beyond accep­tance of these things I know I won’t know, to an even more basic view: All of exis­tence is utterly pointless.

I’ve believed for a long time that life is point­less, but then I see most things in a bleak and dreary light, so this shouldn’t sur­prise you. We go about our brief, tiny lives, flit­ting from here to there like insects, but unlike insects we fill our heads with thoughts of grandiose self-importance.

We think because we build, cre­ate, destroy, repro­duce, kill and dom­i­nate our domain that we’re so impor­tant, so wor­thy of every­thing we take for granted that we’ve missed just how insignif­i­cant we are in the scheme of the universe.

And if it turns out we are the most advanced liv­ing crea­tures in the uni­verse, then what does it say about that universe?

That it is just as insignif­i­cant as we are.

The uni­verse is big­ger and more diverse than any­one can ever imag­ine. I don’t think I can come up with a frac­tion small enough to express how much we know about it, but I can try.

We know this much:

1/100000000000000000000000000000000000000000^{100000000000000000000000000}

Even if you don’t under­stand frac­tions, or expo­nen­tial num­bers, I’m sure you can see that is an extremely small num­ber. It a chip off a fleck of dust above zero.

That’s how much we know.

We think we know a lot more.

By choos­ing to believe in the utter point­less­ness of all exis­tence and that any deeper under­stand­ing of all that exists is impos­si­ble with­out accept­ing the unprove­able, can be quite liberating.

If we let go of the unknow­able, then we can con­cen­trate on the things that mat­ter to us per­son­ally. Sure, you still have to play ball with soci­ety, pay your taxes, eat your veg­eta­bles and brush your teeth, but you’re doing all those things for your­self, with­out won­der­ing why you’re here.

Oh, who am I kid­ding, I’ll obsess about this crap for­ever, utter point­less­ness or not.

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