In one hundred years, give or take, everything that you know and every person that you know will be nonexistent. With exception to the caveats of legacy, bloodline, and infrastructure, every relationship that you make and every ounce of hard work that you put in during this life that you have in this moment, will be over and gone. It will be “onto the next one,” as some bass dropping musicians put it, with regards to the next generation.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise. This is how time has worked since the beginning of its invention — even with respect to your opinion on the metaphysical definition of the concept — and this is how time will continue henceforth. The fact of the matter, and the truth that poses harder to swallow for some over others, is that our time on this earth is limited. We are going to die. Or perhaps put into a more effective phrase, our lives are going to end. With that comes the end of years of hard work, years of passion and dedication, years of love and financial gain, and years of experiences and stories. Does that mean that we should all throw in the towel now? If it all comes to an end and we can’t take it with us to the place that we may or may not be headed, should we just give up trying and spend the days we have left just existing in space watching the waves crash before us?
Not exactly.
A cliché, but a humbling experience nonetheless, try lying beneath the stars and consider your life. You are a flesh and bone living organism that was brought to this very point in the history of humanity by thousands of chance interactions and situational crosslinks. An unfathomable amount of circumstances had to either go right or wrong for you to be able to occupy the skin bag that you are in. Even further, our ancestors had to navigate through the trials and celebrations of life in order for you to be able to blast your trials and celebrations on social media for the world to see. That’s significant.
On the same note, look back up at the stars, we are floating on a respectfully tiny piece of rock in a universe that expands beyond anything we can comprehend. We are small. I’m talking smaller than a single atom that you may or may not remember from your high school biology class. Smaller, even, than the amount of social media “likes” that you might stress yourself out about for that post with the great lighting. And your life, in the grand scheme of the timelines of all other lives, is a single notch on the proverbial tree of life — one that has hundreds of growth rings I might add. And while that tree may give off oxygen, hold your breath because we are each a single inhalation in the history of all the respiratory cycles of humanity.
What does this all mean? What does one lifetime at a single point in time filled with the company of billions of other lifetimes mean to our personal importance?
It means everything.
Once we accept that fact that the only story we are the hero in is our egos, we can understand the importance of our interdependency. In an ironic turn of conceptuality, once you realize how unimportant you are to the earth’s unraveling, you can see how important you actually are to the presence of which you find yourself in. Every single interaction you have, every chance you get to be a person that improves somebody else’s day versus someone that chooses to be a four-letter-word in somebody else’s day, reverberates.
I don’t know where you stand on believing if energy exists or not, or even if you choose to believe that it can be transferred, but regardless, I’ll use this opportunity to re-familiarize you with a few more concepts from that high school biology class (who knew it was going to circle back around like this).
We are, in essence, souls/spirits/lizards/mental processes/chemical solutions/nothingness/enter your preferred verbage here, and we are wearing these skin suits equipped with bones and muscles and organs that keep us alive, all of which are made of cells. Now, down to the cellular level, we have quite a bit going on. I’ll save the juicy details and boil it down to the accepted scientific fact that these cells are producing energy. We then use this energy to survive, reproduce, exercise, explore, scroll through our phones and to interact with other living organisms, also made of cells. Diving into that last one, when we interact, the energy that we use becomes exposed as social gestures.
This brings me to Sir Isaac Newton. Being the intelligent man that he was, he developed a few important laws for how things moved around. My focus here will be on the third one. The gist of Sir Isaac Newton’s third law of motion is that for every action there will be an equal and opposite reaction. Put simply, if you are a complete a — to someone, chances are they will either be a complete a — right back, or they will hold that aggression (energy) with passivity and transfer it along somewhere further down the line to another unsuspecting life force.
So, what happens?
The very energy that we used for the physiological endeavor of smiling at the barista behind the counter at the coffee shop is then transferred to him or her and hopefully then transferred back as a positive social interaction. We then have a choice. This is the key part. We can then absorb that energy and use it as a positive reward system for our brains to believe that not all humans are terrible organisms, despite what might be happening in their minds, or we can be robots that operate on the recurrent fuel of caffeine and allow the interaction to be calculated as a societal norm. This situation can then be seen again and again throughout the day with your coworkers, family, strangers, friends, fellow mass transportation attendees, the person blocking the avocados at the grocery store, or even furrier presences such as animals.
Each interaction we have is a chance to give off and receive energy. Each interaction is a chance to be present. What happens if we allow our routines and social norms to unravel like the routines and calculated social norms that they are? We expend energy without replenishing it. We exhale without remembering to inhale.
How did we end up in the current state of the world that we ended up in? We all collectively exhaled for a very long time, then something shocking happened (I won’t specify what the shocking event might be for your own personal story) and we woke up to a situation where headlines are more traumatic than television crime dramas. As we woke up, we coughed and inhaled the sweet chemical that is oxygen only to find that the atmosphere seemed to be lacking enough of it. Without trudging any further through this analogy, I’ll sum it up by saying that we all had our heads down preoccupied by whatever distraction or routine we were caught up in only to look up and find that a whole lot of negative energy has scattered itself around like poppy seeds on an everything bagel.
Bringing this all back around to your insignificance, we all forgot that each and every day we are all interacting with other greatly insignificant human beings in everything that we do. This can’t happen. If we deem ourselves unimportant, if we deem our mundane jobs, our passions, our personalities, our purpose, our lifetimes as unimportant on a small-scale level then this will snowball through the masses and we will be forced cope with it. Then, through this coping, we will be forced to leave an unfortunate collective legacy on our small piece of the human timeline like evidence of a fire on the growth ring in the tree of life. And I, for one, have too much damn respect for Smokey the Bear to be considered an arsonist.
This whole life experience thing is crazy. Being granted the opportunity to be a human is an insane journey and to be honest, a miracle in and of itself. Only seven billion other life sources get the opportunity to do it at this very moment and on this very planet, so with that, we are all responsible for how this ride goes. We are all responsible for the foundation that the next generation gets to build upon, because it’s happening regardless of how we feel about it. Nothing that you do actually matters and so every little thing you do is of the utmost importance.
With as much simplicity as evolution and Yahweh could procure, we are given two choices: enjoy it, or don’t.
We will toil, we will grind, we will hurt, we will cry, we will suffer, we will judge, we will argue, we will die, but between all of that, we will live. And, with living, comes love, and passion, and hope, and humor, and fun, and openness, and meaning, and celebration, and family, and music, and friends, and sunrises, and food, and nature, and pets, and coffee, and travel, and books, and consensual sex, and meaningful work and purpose.
So, enjoy it.
Buy your friends another round, reach out to that friend or stranger and tell them that they rock, talk with the cashier in the grocery store about the music, high five the person next to you in that exercise class, give that book that meant something to you to someone who means something, walk the extra block to recycle, love whoever it is you want to love, laugh at yourself and double down on the weird things that you do because they don’t matter — none of it matters — and because of that, everything does.