Your garden variety Existential conundrum.
Most of our lives are uneventful. We exist so others after us can exist. All of our experiences- the highs, the lows, the wonderfully exciting to the terribly mundane… this very sentence, even - has been written about and bemoaned over for centuries, by innumerable people. What differentiates this post from all those others, you ask? Not a thing… and that’s the point.
Our lives mean nothing in the long run. The existence of all life will be a little blip in the universe’s timeline, which in itself is an arbitrary and man-made concept. That life formed on this planet was, ridiculously miraculous as it appears, nothing more than a bunch of atoms expressing themselves in accordance with the rules of the universe when exposed to certain stimuli. We’re just one of the many the ongoing side effects one big clusterfuck of coincidences, and yet we’ve been arrogant enough to believe that we’re the center of the universe just because we understand a smidgen of less than a fraction of a fraction of its working.
The universe doesn’t owe us shit. Hell, we don’t even owe each other shit. All we are is a medium for life to propagate. We aren’t too different from the first multi-cellular organisms, that spider hiding behind your bed stand waiting for you to turn off your light so it can run free between your nose and upper lip, or that hideous looking sea monster only found in the Mariana Trench. We are, all of us, just big clumps of ‘sentient’ organic matter whose sole purpose is the continued survival of our genetic code which, in the most ironic of twists, has become completely unrecognizable from its beginnings all those years ago.
For all of our advances in every field imaginable, a little asteroid somewhere could veer off-course thanks to the gravity of a moon of a planet of a star and get pulled into a black hole years later, tip it past it’s critical mass and make it spew Gamma rays in our direction and wipe out ninety five percent of all life on the planet, and yet things would carry on as if it were just another cosmic Tuesday. (Think about THAT the next time you demand a free order of curly fries because you got ONE normal fry with your order.) (Disclaimer: I do not work in the service industry.)
People talk about how everyone ought to travel the world, try different cuisines, trek to the summit of the highest peaks or assimilate different cultural values… screw that. By all means, if you like cake, get yourself some Goddamn cake. If cheese is your thing, own it. (Yep, all of it. All of the world’s supply of cheese.) That last level of Tetris your peak? Scale that motherf*cker. Hate the LGBT community? Picket their events to your heart’s content. (I wouldn't, personally, but that’s only because I'm not a terrible person and an overall poor excuse for a human being.)
Point is, do what makes your bag of molecules release more Dopamine into your system. Your body releasing dopamine is your body telling you to do more of what you just did, because whatever you did is in agreement with the underlying theme of everything, ever: live long enough to do the things that will give you the best chance of passing your DNA along.
Is the resolution of the existential crisis perhaps that we exist so We can continue to exist? Probably. Probably not. Who gives a shit anyway? Somebody get me some cake.
