Hello! What follows – to be put on here gradually over the next couple of weeks – are some scattered thoughts about entropy, consciousness, religion and philosophy. None of it is really original to me – a lot of this is pretty much book notes cribbed from various sources, popular books written across various disciplines. It’s pretty crass, in two senses. First of all, I use a couple of rude words here and there, which I hope you’ll excuse, but I’m just trying to get the ideas across as idiomatically as possible. And second, the science – and the religion, too – is pretty basic and non-technical and, I’m sure, full of errors and inconsistencies. What’s written here is really just a first draft, or more precisely, an attempt to get some scattered thoughts in order.

I’ll print the thoughts here 5 sections at a time. So stay tuned for further posts. I will likely edit it as I go along, too. I welcome your comments and observations. Thanks!! Your compatriot in the search for meaning, – Bob

1. Life is hard, and consciousness is hard. Cats are probably right to be so pissed off all the time.

2. The universe, as you know, is made up of vast areas of nothingness, and a few scattered lumpy bits.

The universe is interesting in the places where it is a bit lumpy. Amidst the vast, unvariegated, endless realm of space, there are supernovas, planets, asteroids, human beings and broccoli. All of this “stuff” involves atoms clumped together more than they typically are in empty space.

The thing is, space tends to get even more non-lumpy over time, so human beings and broccoli are batting against the curve, so to speak. Or to put it a little more scientifically: the fact that there are these lumpy bits of matter is challenged by the second law thermodynamics, otherwise known as entropy.

The law of entropy basically says, to put it crassly, “left to its own devices, time turns everything to shit.” Given enough time, the lumpy, clumpy bits of matter are broken down, Sometimes people refer to entropy as “tending towards disorder”  because a piece of broccoli, with its ridges and curves, feels more ordered than the green, broccoli-flavored soup that broccoli would become when it was liquified. And all of us lumpy bits, over time, tend towards the soup.  Supernovas, planets, asteroids, human beings and broccoli are all statistically headed towards that vast, unvariegated, endless realm of space, our atoms spread out wider than they are in our beautiful bodies. We all tend towards the perfect distribution of matter and energy.

3. Time’s arrow is important to entropy. It’s not the other way around – vast, endless space is not tending towards gathering its atoms together to form broccoli. Time is messing with all these beautifully lumpy forms and smoothing them out, making all the atoms evenly distributed. Time doesn’t do this right away (you can keep your lunch plans). We’re talking about tendencies and averages here. Given enough time, the universe gets more and more regular, atoms perfectly spaced out. WE are gradually heading towards an equidistant distribution of matter – which, from our point of view, is quite boring.

Of course, “shit” and “boring” are subjective terms from the human perspective. Indeed, another word for unvariegated space, other than “shit”, might be “perfection”. Systems tend towards a perfect distribution of matter. But what this “perfection” means, when it comes to the distribution of atoms, is a few particles floating about here and there, not clumping together. If a house party were perfectly distributed, every guest would be six feet away from the nearest guest in every direction – no guests sitting next to each other, no one closer to each other than anyone else, like the dots on square dots graph paper. Which might be kinda fun for our antisocial friends who hate house parties, come to think of it – but let’s not get distracted. In the wide-open universe, if all the relatively few atoms that are out there were perfectly distributed, there are very few atoms relative to the amount of space that’s out there. So a perfect distribution ends up being a few random swirling atoms, far apart from each other.

4. “Clumping together” is how matter happens, how stuff appears in the universe. There are – fortunately for us – forces of attraction that allow this to happen, like gravity and electromagnetism. These forces help to complicate the natural flow of entropy, which, left to its own devices, would turn everything to an un-lumpy, perfectly distributed nothingness.  

5. Given enough time, entropy will eventually “win” over the forces of attraction. You’d best cancel your lunch plans sixty billion years from now; they ain’t happening.

Gravity, electromagnetism and the strong nuclear force may appear to us as being really, really strong. They can hold stuff together for an impressive amount of time. But forces are dependent on various factors like distance and mass. Entropy is a physical law: it just keeps on happening, all the time. You could say entropy waits inexorably for the moment when the laws of attraction trip up, and then, poof, things tend slightly again towards a diffuse tapioca. Attractive forces can hold things together for millennia, but they just need to make one “mistake” and entropy will swoop in, and turn everything towards the evenly distributed perfection, that vast boringness that awaits all.

Again, entropy doesn’t do this all at once, but haltingly, bit by bit over vast amounts of time. Regions of space usually take a long while to go from lumpy, diverse somethings to the almost-nothing of tapioca, diffuse perfection. Lumps bump into other lumps, new forms get made. A planet falls out of one orbit and then, a few million years later, gets pulled into a red supergiant. A whole lot can happen in constrained space. Here on earth, which is always constrained by gravity and other forces, there will be a whole lot happening for a long time. But gradually, inexorably, over time and all the time, the universe tends towards a vast nothingness. Good luck, player one.

6. Let’s talk about what is probably my favorite bits of lumpy matter in the whole universe: life forms!

Life is a fascinating type of defense against the natural laws of entropy. Every life, from the amoeba through to the German Shepherd and every life form in between, has a kind of strategy to keep from falling to shit – at least, for a little while. We are beautiful entropy-defeating little monsters.

7.Every life has a form, more or less. A life can have the form of a tiger or the form of a coral reef of the form of a 49-year-old 6-foot-2 human being with unkempt hair and a scraggly beard (which is not quite as magnificent as a German Shepherd, but it’s OK).

I say “every life has a form, more or less” because, as the Buddhists remind us, it’s not always clear where a being ends and the not-being begins (the “not-being” being everything that isn’t the life form – i.e., the rest of the universe). Are the tippy-tips of your fingernails – just about to flake off this very microsecond – part of  you, or are they not you? It would be impossible to determine whether every atom, definitively, belongs to you or not.

Beyond such philosophical questions of where our physical form begins and ends, it’s also and obviously true that our forms are changing all the time. We grow in height, gain or lose a few pounds, cut our hair, and so on. The neurons that – through some magic we still don’t fully understand – contribute to our thoughts are changing in their patterns every micro-second, as well as being formed and destroyed by the millions.

One more complication about form: what constitutes an individual life form is not as simple as it sounds. Is a swarm of bees a single life form? We would typically say “no” – but scientists have begun calling a swarm of bees a “superorganism”, as it tends to behave as a single being, in many respects. Or for another example, a bacterium is its own thang. But we have 38 trillion bacteria that help to constitute us, as a single being – and we wouldn’t et without them; they really are an integral part of us, inseparable from our bodily identity. We are 38 trillion bacteria, but each bacterium is its own organism, too.

And let’s just not get started about AI, and whether it is capable of being alive, and if so, whether it has a physical form or not. Save that for another fascinating essay, on another fascinating day.

To recap: every life has a form, more or less.

8. Life preserves its individual form against destruction in the usual ways inert and living matter keeps its form – but it uses additional techniques as well, unavailable to inert matter.

Inert matter doesn’t immediately surrender to the laws of entropy. You don’t see every passing planet instantly crumble into pieces. Again, this is because of the usual attractive forces of the universe. Gravity, as well as electromagnetic force, help keep planets stay roughly the same from one moment to the next. These attractive forces provide a temporary bulwark against the immutable law of entropy.

Life forms are forms of matter, just as rocks and planets are forms of matter. Life forms have their own gravity (though much less of it, because we’re rather small). We also benefit from the attractive forces of electromagnetism and strong nuclear force. But life has got something else going for it as well.

Life can make changes based on its perception of the outside environment. It inputs data about threats to its form, and then comes up with a response to external and internal factors. Feeling parched? Grow deeper roots. (Or get a glass of water, if growing deeper roots isn’t available to you). Sense a predator? Run away. Or release a toxin that makes your stem less delicious. Or tell it a distracting story while searching for the can of mace. Every life form is adjusting to data it collects from the outside world.

So every life has a form, and every life is capable of mustering some sort of reaction to stimuli, with a goal of keeping that form, more or less. Every life form separates the world – roughly – into “me” and “not me”. This heart beating fast inside my chest is me, but that tiger staring at me is definitely not me. Some life forms are lot less egotistical than we are about it all – they may possess no concept of “me”, or even concepts at all. Nevertheless, whether or not they possess concepts, every life form is trying to preserve their own form against the onslaught of forces trying to dissolve the “me” into the great, big, universal perfection of non-lumpy diffuseness. Or as it is known to a tiger, “lunch”.

9. Speaking of lunch, every life form consumes an inordinate amount of energy, in order to fight its fight against the forces of entropy. We humans aren’t the only gas guzzlers on the planet, metaphorically speaking. Every life form on the planet (and, on other planets as well, presumably) consumes energy in order to preserve its form and react to stimuli. There is a material cost to being alive.

In terms of entropy, we are all wasteful as well. We fight entropy locally, in our own bodies – but in terms of the entropy of the world, every life form is entropy’s partner.  In other words, and crassly, we organisms are quite adept at turning the universe into shit. Although life forms are by definition low-entropy, each and every life form increases the net entropy of the universe. Our beautiful individual lumpiness comes at a cost. A gross cost, for the net gain of our individual and temporary lumpiness. And it’s a permanent cost – our life, every single life, will increase the total entropy of the universe. We are lumpy, but each and every one of us makes the universe less lumpy. We are destroying what is interesting about the universe, in order to live our own, individual, interesting lives. So you see the original “original sin” wasn’t that Adam and Eve pilfered an apple from the tree of knowledge, but that they had to eat anything in the first place. Every life form embodies the genesis of its own destruction.

10. “Hold on, Bob,” you be thinking. “That’s a pretty sentence, but it’s hogwash. Look at the history of the world. We started off with a few basic prokaryotes and now we have elephants, spaceships and emo rock. Surely the world is getting more interesting, not less.”

Good point, my imaginary conversational partner. In oh so many ways, life leads to more life – and more interesting life, too. Life continues to evince this drive to live, to carry on against entropy. And because the outside world is so varied, the life that survives the travails of existence finds more and more varied strategies to keep going. Over time, we life forms get really interesting, because the challenges to life are so manifold. As said before, “interesting” is a highly subjective word here – there may be observers who are fascinated by vast tracts of empty space, or zillions of exact copies of the same form. But we get generally more varied and complex, and from the human standpoint that’s an improvement to life. Though I’m sure prokaryotes are cool too, even though they can’t play the violin.

Two of the more effective strategies that life forms use against entropy are reproduction and growth. A life form puts bits of itself outside itself, but then that secondary form becomes a new entity, a rough copy of itself with the means of responding to outside stimuli. “Copy” is perhaps a misleading word here, because to the life form the idea is created more of itself, not just something else that is very like itself. And the material for the “copy” comes, at least at first, from the original organism.

This new entity, often, will grow bigger over time, by consuming energy. This new entity may well reproduce too, in time. Someone’s probably already told you about the birds and the bees; I won’t bore you with the details here.

When it comes to entropy, all of these “life happenings” – reproduction, growth, evolution, response to stimuli – comes at a deferred cost. So, yes, life gets more interesting in the short term. Here on earth, we are in year 3.8 billion of that short-term period (which is not that short term, from our human perspective). Plucky prokaryotes are joined, in time, by multi-celled organisms. Plants and fish cover the ground and swim in the seas. Nature takes its ten thousand thousand forms. Life on earth gets really, really interesting – and our entropy, the entropy of individual life forms, keeps going down. We get more lumpy, more complex, less soupy.

Down is not the way entropy is supposed to go – remember, entropy refers to the kind of evenly distributed shapelessness that happens as clumps of matter smooth out over time. And yet life on earth has gotten more lumpy, not less. So why has earth been beating the entropy curve for the last 3.8 billion years? Basically, we get a lot of energy from the sun. So the entropy of everything is going up, as sure as death and taxes, but our own little ball has had 3.8 million years of having less entropy, more lumpiness, and more complex systems. Go team!

11. I started this essay by telling you what all cats, and some humans, already know: life is hard, and consciousness is hard. We’ll get to consciousness later (as the lovers said to each other, before their first cup of coffee). For now, let’s talk about life, and why it’s so hard.

“Things fall apart,” as the poet Yeats said. Your waistline isn’t going to last. Not just your hair, but your teeth are going to fall out of your head – possibly before death, or maybe after, but inevitably, and soonish. Your lifeblood will drain out, and your body will return to the earth. It’s a literal spoiler alert.

That’s when it comes to our individual bodies, anyway. With the earth on a winning streak against entropy for 3.8 billion years, it’s easy to feel a bit sanguine about the bigger picture. It probably won’t bum you out to learn that the earth is predicted to crash into the sun in about 7.5 billion years. Not as much as losing your hair, anyway.

But the thing is, on the small scale and on the large scale, it’s observably a losing battle. Things will fall apart, entropy will win in the end.  For whatever reason, overall entropy only goes in one direction, relative to time. Local entropy can go into 3.8 billion-year winning streaks. An area of space, such as earth or a very well-run Starbucks, can become increasingly more complex over a given period time. But it does so at a cost to the overall entropy of the universe. Sooner or later, we all turn to mush. That’s the very nature of this universe, the observable laws of it.

12. It’s possible that other universes are different – that there are systems where entropy does not increase with time, where it goes backwards or stays the same. We just don’t know.

The religious idea of heaven, often, describes a place where things don’t fall apart, where everything lasts, where nothing is ever lost. You might say that heaven is humankind’s inspired response to the reality of entropy. Many artists have remarked that heaven feels a bit boring. But again, we don’t really know what such a hypothetical place would be like. All we can do is attempt to remove entropy from the picture, in our mind’s eye.

13. I could say, colloquially, “entropy always wins in the end.” But what does that really mean? Why does it matter more, that the universe in fifty billion years is a formless mass, compared to right now, when life is going strong and we’re between seasons of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia? We have a peculiar predilection for assessing what happens in the end as more important what happens in the middle. As we’ll see, this looking forward is a feature of consciousness – we are biased to over-value future threats over present pleasures. This bias increases our chances of survival. But if we take this bias out of the equation, maybe we should stop saying “entropy always wins in the end.” Maybe, instead, it is better to say “entropy often loses in the middle.”

14. OK, let’s add consciousness into the mix (as if things aren’t already heady enough in this essay).

There are lots of fascinating discussions going on about what creatures and entities possess consciousness, and what consciousness consists in – discussions which, thankfully, we needn’t concern ourselves with much in this little essay. Suffice to say, amongst all of the random variations that evolution threw against the wall of entropy, some types or levels of awareness were tried, and somehow, awareness stuck.

 Now, awareness is just one of many strategies life uses to perpetuate itself. Aware life forms are still engaged in essentially the same strategies against the tide of entropy as everybody else. That is to say: intelligent life forms preserve their form and homeostasis (homeostasis is a fancy term for “keeps on keepin’ on” – more on this later), they consume materials to give them energy, they repulse and run away from threats, they reproduce to keep the wider species alive, and so on. We’re not all that different from amoebas in our basic orientation towards the universe. Consciousness is essentially another tool in our toolbox.

15. Consciousness allows us to predict or sense possible future situations and adjust our present actions accordingly. “I’m feeling cold – this could be bad for me – but if I put this blanket on, maybe it will make me warmer.” Consciousness implies some kind of choice. I could put the blanket on, or I could not. Philosophers have puzzled about whether we actually have free will until their puzzlers were sore: do we really choose to put the blanket on, or was it inevitable, given our situation and biochemistry, that we would have made that choice? But it seems to us, anyway, and to another person watching us, that we have a choice between putting the blanket on, and not putting it on.

So consciousness supplies us, in some mental way, with a range of options to choose from. The goal is still the same: beat entropy. Keep yourself alive. Keep your species alive. Fight entropy with life. With more choices, more options at maximizing survival.

That’s the idea, anyway. I mean, you could use your consciousness, once you have it, to ruminate on consciousness, or to decide you don’t want to live after all, or to develop intricate schools of philosophical thought. But that’s the thing about choices – once you insert them into the mix, a few examples of the species are likely to make some weird ones.

16. On the whole, though, consciousness is there to help keep us alive. There are a billion possibilities out there, many of which involve our being turned to dust (individually or collectively), and every waking moment, consciousness tries to identify and ameliorate future threats, while looking for the possibilities that are the best bet to keep us around.

Often, an organism’s best bet to staying around, is homeostasis. Life forms keep a running gauge of different things like temperature, sugar levels, upright balance, and how much fun we’re having. Generally, we want these levels to stay more or less the same. We get too hot, we die. We get too cold, we die. So if we get a little bit hot or a little bit cold, we have all sorts of sensors to tell us, “uh oh, this direction of travel ain’t good.” Life form try to keep things roughly the same. This drive towards stability is known as homeostasis. Homeostasis, more than anything else, is what keeps us alive. An organism is almost always looking to preserve its perceived ideal state from moment to moment. I know, I know – you love change,  you’re a Sagittarius. There are exceptions to homeostasis – times when change is actively sought. But overall, we life forms don’t love massive change. Change is dangerous.

Change is fundamentally dangerous, because life forms measure their success against entropy, by the amount they are able to keep their form, in a universe that is always trying to turn it into soup. This leads us to be prejudiced towards our own form. If I were suddenly to be somehow magically traded out for 50,000 grasshoppers – my body replaced by the form of 50,000 other tiny beings – it’s hard to say for sure if that’s a great or terrible thing. I mean, I have nothing against grasshoppers, they seem really cool. And also, 50,000 is a lot more than 1. But as a life form evolved in the ways of homeostasis, all my systems (except for my somewhat overactive imagination) would be horrified by the impending change, because they wouldn’t know what to do with it. Life works by trying to keep things roughly the same, in a universe that is always offering avenues of change. And sometimes change very quickly, into soup.

None of the above paragraph constitutes a living will, in any legal sense.

Just as consciousness is not the primary tool of life forms, consciousness is not the primary tool of homeostasis. Homeostasis is fundamental to all life forms, which are always trying to keep on keepin’ on. Consciousness appears much later on the evolutionary timeline than homeostasis. So we have all kinds of unconsciousness systems that regulate our internal chemistry, our fluid levels, our temperature, day and night, every second of the day. If these systems go badly awry – and there are lots of supplementary systems to help keep them functioning – we are, to put it simply, totally fucked. Consciousness can’t help us there.

So, in many practical ways, consciousness is not the most important system of our being, at least not in terms of what’s keeping us alive. Stimulating the adrenal glands to produce cortisol to prevent against fatal shock is more immediately urgent, most of the time, than choosing what to have for lunch. But there are occasions when choosing what to have for lunch is quite important (“maybe not the liverwurst, my cousin poisoned it yesterday.”)

Where consciousness helps us are in certain nuanced, long-term, complex situations, where it’s helpful to make a slightly more deliberative choice than “blood sugar low = release cortisol”. Consciousness is a tool that helps us navigate a complex world, by deciding between different scenarios. “I could eat the liverwurst sandwich, but then I would die of poison, because, even though it looks and smells just fine, I retain the memory of my cousin poisoning it yesterday.”

17. There are times when an organism doesn’t just want immediate homeostasis. For instance, when we’re teenagers, we still want to keep our cortisol levels roughly equivalent, but we also want to be cool so that we can impress Gina, which is part of our unconscious drive to become an adult, sometimes involving our drive to reproduce. An organism in adolescence is drawn towards certain risky changes, which facilitate long-term survival. At the same time, we long for the security of homeostasis. Has anyone told you that being a teenager is hard? Being a teenager is hard.

Organisms also break out of homeostasis in response to external factors. Lizards will shed their tail to escape predators. Homeostasis is the general goal, when things are pretty stable and the going is good. But when the housecat is trying to eat you – or you’re trying to impress Gina – all bets are off. Consciousness helps us to break out of our usual homeostasis, when it is necessary or advisable for long-term survival.

18. A nifty side effect of consciousness is that it gives us the felt experience of being alive. This, a core feature of our existence, is something of a mystery. We don’t know why, exactly, we human beings notice we’re alive. Why do we have an interiority, a felt noticing of the world around us? It could be the existence of the soul, whatever that is, or an evolutionary quirk that somehow aids in the process of making decisions. But whatever it is, we notice the smell of a gardenia bush, or the feeling of elation when a friend greets us. We can guess at how this felt sense – the sense that life is happening to us – might present an evolutionary advantage. If we had an interiority, a sense of “me” to our experiences as well as the raw sense of self that comes from being a life form, it helps us to differentiate between “me” and “not me”, and navigate the threats and opportunities present in the latter.

Philosophers refer to these felt experiences as qualia, a term that may come in handy later in this essay. And if not, it’s really fun to say.

19. One of the really hard parts about consciousness is that we are aware, at least dimly, that we are going to die someday.

We may block out this awareness sometimes, but really, we know. The same consciousness that helps us prepare for the future also lets us know that the future has an end. The same consciousness that gives us a sense of interiority, a sense of being an individual being alive and having experiences in the world, tells us that this interiority is not forever.

20. We could console ourselves to the fact of death with the truism that death only occurs after everything else that’s going to happen in our lives has already happened. Which is kind of convenient, when you think about it.

Although the final exit – Death with a capital “D” – only happens to us once, there are lots of ancillary bummers along the way. Our consciousness is always trying to maintain homeostasis – and it’s always failing. Our waistline grows and our bank balance declines. We lose our jobs and stub our toes (or worse). Many times a day, little tragedies befall us: plans don’t work out, something goes wrong, we veer ever so slightly from homeostasis.

In Buddhism, the Pali term Dukkha, as I understand it, refers to the idea that there are always bumps on the road of life – nothing ever quite goes smoothly. We so desperately want to feel like everything is secure, that we’re in control of the situation, that everything is smooth and nothing will go wrong. All of these expectations are wrong. We are not in control of the situation, almost nothing is smooth and something will go wrong, sooner or later. So even as we wait for the big ending of our lives each of our little hopes and dreams, are gently dashed, one by one, against the rocks that line life’s way.

21. While I’m on such a cheery note, there’s one more dissatisfaction of life that I want to mention, a peculiar paradox of consciousness. As said, consciousness is designed to usually seek out homeostasis. It wants everything to stay more or less the same. The existence consciousness generally craves is one of “no alarms and no surprises” (to quote Radiohead), a friction-free, totally smooth existence. As we said, that’s somewhere between vanishingly rare to completely impossible to achieve.

But to make matter even worse – and infinitely more comical – consciousness itself by necessityexhibits the very volatility it is designed to root out. Consciousness is always changing and morphing, and almost never still. Because it’s constantly seeking out threats to homeostasis, consciously itself is constantly dissatisfied – so it’s never in a state of homeostasis. It’s like if you had a drug-sniffing dog who was composed entirely of heroin. Consciousness is permanently suspicious of consciousness.  Consciousness sees itself as a problem.

There, now you have something to tell your therapist. The very mechanic in you, that is designed to seek out threats to its well-being, sees its own existence as a threat. And consciousness isn’t wrong on this one, either: consciousness is a bit risky, for those species unfortunate enough to adopt it as a strategy. Consciousness gives us the ability to make some really bad choices, as well as good ones. No wonder, at the level of consciousness, we simply don’t trust ourselves.

22. So there are vast parts of you – the homeostasis systems – that would like everything to stay exactly the same, forever, for nothing to every happen and you to stay in your tidy little cocoon. And yet, you’ve made plans for Friday night. How come?

For one thing, total homeostasis isn’t practical, and every organism knows this. You need to eat sometime, in order to have the energy required to maintain the status quo. Having wings at the bar accomplishes this as well as anything else.

But it’s not just the food. Like Cindy Lauper, we want to have fun. Dopamine and serotonin – chemicals of serenity and social connection – give our organism the warm glow associated with elevated odds of survival. Good friends and a clear mind give us a noticeable edge over the whims of fate. Whatever challenges arrive, we have strong means to overcome them.

I’m being very transactional about fun and friendship here. Few of us text our friends, “want to go out tonight – I’m looking to increase my future odds of survival.” Few of us even think it. Even though dopamine and serotonin may have evolved as means of survival, at the level of our own consciousness, we value friendship for its own sake, as one of the most wonderful treasures of life. Forgive me getting sappy, but it’s very much true. Maybe, the cynic may say, evolution wants us to believe we’re engaging in friendship because we love our friends, when really the evolutionary impetus are the advantages conferred on a person with friends, in our social species. Nevertheless, we do believe it, and we really do love our friends. So it all kinda comes out in the wash.

23. So there’s a part of us that wants nothing to ever change and to live boring lives – stay still and live forever, a.k.a. the “homeostasis solution”. But because staying still might actually not work in our favor long-term (we’d have no friends, no prospects, and would just be waiting around for wandering bears to eat us), there is another part that wants us to go out and have fun and make friends and get a great job and live meaningful lives. But here’s the kicker: on the homeostasis level, our overarching desire – encompassing all the little activities that necessarily make up our day – is to go out and have fun and make friends and get a great job and live meaningful lives in order that someday, we might be successful enough to stay still and live forever. We want to “make it” so that then we will not have to go out and take risks ever again. On a psycho-biological level, it seems like we want to roll the hamster wheel of karma, doing stuff and the world of action, in order to someday get off the hamster wheel of karma.

You’ve seen those mediocre 80s movies, so you know what happens with this cycle in middle age. After all that strive, when we have finally “made it” – when we have the great job and 2.5 kids and the swimming pool – we find there are still plenty of daily threats to our homeostasis. So we keep striving, keep looking for that elusive homeostasis solution. And we go into therapy, and blame our parents.

24. The story thus far: we are these meaningful little lumps, swimming against the tide of entropy. The universe, generally, smooths out meaningful little lumps. But because it only does so very gradually, we have time for these meaningful lumps of matter to combine with other meaningful lumps, and to create even larger, more meaningful lumps: large, complex systems like muskrats and blue whales and the I-95.  

Life could be considered a meaningful lump with an edge: it creates a boundary between itself and the world, and then takes note of the world, responding to it in order to keep that form going. Conscious life is life with the addition of some kind of future planning. A conscious life form responds to stimuli, towards the goal of having the future state of “still being alive.” We often seek homeostasis – to preserve our form and our essence from moment to moment. Because this is impossible, we also look towards some future homeostasis where everything is cool and chill. This, of course, is impossible – in fact, our own consciousness is not, by design, that cool and chill. So we tend to distrust our own consciousness, and look outside it, for the solution to the problem of being alive, and knowing it.

You’re probably done with your popcorn by now, so I’ll try to start bringing this essay in for a landing, with a few thoughts on what to do, if you find yourself alive.

25. If you find yourself alive, don’t panic. Everything will be fine. Well, it will be fine for a second or two, and then something bad will happen, and then something else, and eventually, you’ll be turned into mush.

So if you want to panic, fine. Go for it. Especially if it helps.

The “problem” with life – if we want to call it a problem – is that it ends. This is necessarily so: every life leads to more entropy in the universe, and entropy, eventually, destroys life. Life can fight the good fight against entropy – can do so for millions of years – but life, collectively, cannot sustain itself in our universe. And the brief candle of our individual life is destined to go out pretty soon, too. And in the meantime, life is no picnic: we’re constantly scrabbling to survive, facing threats and obstacles, and generally having to make a living.

The “problem” with consciousness is that we’re aware that life ends. This is especially difficult for us because consciousness is so forward-looking. Consciousness is designed to be preparing for possible future states, and the final, ultimate state is the end of life. Which is exactly what consciousness is designed, futilely, to prevent.

And in the meantime – because you probably won’t die today, statistically speaking – we are surrounded by all the little signs of death: change, disappointment, anxiety. We want to feel secure and unthreatened in this universe, which is a little like wanting to go through a child’s ball pit, as long as none of those pesky balls touch me.

26. It’s tempting to try to come up with a ”solution” to the “problem” of consciousness – but seeing those words in quotes, has probably alerted you to the possibility that I’m going to try to weasel my way out of it.

The fact that life has an end, and is eventually overwhelmed by entropy, is only a problem because we choose it to be. It’s sad, from our perspective, because we vastly prefer octopi and beach balls and opera and perhaps even mosquitos to vast realms of nothing. We look forward to, and want, the future being at least as awesome and beautiful as the present.

But why should the future have all the fun? We have opera and beach balls and opera (and mosquitos) right at the moment. Which is nice.

27. So one “solution” to the “problem” of life and consciousness in to live in the present, “be here now”, etc. The reason this is so difficult is because we are forward-facing – consciousness’ primary function is to prepare for the future. We are always getting ready for any threats or opportunities that come our way. Even if we’re on an awesome new roller coaster, there is a sliver of our brain saying, “Whee! This is fun… right now, at least.” Meanwhile, a lot of our brain is still committed to processing the many different ways we may be turned to mush in the near future. If we can train ourselves to focus a little more on the whee!, and a little less on the “danger, Will Robinson!”, we may be happier for it.

Given how malleable the neural pathways of the brain are, we have a fair bit of leeway when it comes to this stuff. Appreciating the moment can be learnt.

28. Like the brooding, handsome stranger that I am, I haven’t spoken much about the past. But the past – in the form of memories – plays a big role in consciousness. This fact may run counter to the supposition that consciousness is primarily focused on the future. The past is unlikely to kill us – why, then, devote so much mental space to it?  

Well, for one thing, we are able to collect data about the past, having already lived it, which we can’t do about the future. So we store all these past events in our memories. Presumably, though, the evolutionary reason memories are in there is to help us make good decisions in the future. We can’t change the past. But we can use the past to make statistical guesses as to what are best behaviors will be today and tomorrow. Perhaps this is why we have so much angst and rue attached to our memories sometimes – our consciousness sees something it finds life-or-death important, and it wants to make sure we never forget it.

29. But perhaps we shouldn’t get too caught up about “evolutionary reasons”. Evolution is random and haphazard. An adaptation of a flipper can work perfectly well for 70,000 years and then, whoosh, conditions change and the flipper isn’t so helpful any more. And then the half a million years later, the descendants of that organism, over many generations, collectively “decide” that flying is the way to go.

Or to put it in human terms: the “reason” that we have a sense of taste, may be predominantly to help us decide which foods are safe to eat, and which foods are more or less worth Jonesing for. When we’re eating a delicious five-course meal, we could say the experience “comes from” our need to distinguish nutritious, safe foods from rat poison – but really, that background doesn’t at all sum up our experience of the meal. We eat a delectable morsel of tofu larb, wash it down with a fine wine, talk to our companion…do we really care, in the moment, whether or not we are increasing our future survival odds?

The same could be said of our experience of the past. When we get a little older, it’s a sublime treat to cast our minds back to a wonderful day, when we were on holiday in the sunshine with cherished companions. We can sit on our rocking chair and almost feel like we’re there again. It’s possible this activity has some genetic “reason.” It‘s just as possible that it’s a side effect of memory, that does little to help or hinder genetic survival – it’s just nice to do. But either way, we don’t need to bother ourselves too much with why some of us like to linger on our past. The genetic “reason” has very little to do with the experience of drawing joy from one’s memories.

30. Few of us, over the age of 12, want to be Genghis Khan. With some notable exceptions, we are wise enough to understand that the attempt to live forever – whether through our power, our progeny, or our lifespan – is a losing battle, and a stupid losing battle at that. Many of us seek some money – maybe quite a bit of money – or some fame or to live a good long life. Many, but by no means all, of us, want to be parents and want our kids to do well.

It’s not that human beings are selfless; many of us would love to be millionaires and live to 150. But most of us realize that, happiness-wise, a zillion dollars, a standing army, and a harem isn’t noticeably better than a million dollars, a great family, and heated seats. And the former is probably a lot more hassle.

So it seems another common solution to life’s “problem” is that old chestnut, moderation. Or as the Buddhists call it, the “Middle Path.”

Life’s attempts to stave off entropy are ultimately futile – ultimately. You’re not going to live forever. You can try to cryogenically freeze your organs, put your name on a thousand buildings, or exert absolute power over the people around you, but you’re going to come off looking like a bit of a fool. It’s natural – biological, in fact – to want security, comfort, and assurance. But getting infinite security, comfort, and assurance points is simply not what the game of life is all about.

31. Quite a lot of human endeavor seems like it may be useful to survival in roughly the same way that duct tape is useful on a particular job around the house: something to be tried out, and if it doesn’t work, we’ll eventually use it for something else.

Take the arts. It’s easy to suppose that the arts had an evolutionary “reason”. Being able to draw pictures of animals was a big hit in the Lascaux caves. It may have helped in instruction, in boosting confidence in the tribe, in religious rituals that created a sense of bonding, and who knows what else. As for the music arts – some scholars hypothesize that we learned how to sing before we learned how to talk. Even now, singing gets across emotion from one person to another with uncanny speed and nuance.

There’s little doubt that art and music has helped us survive, individually and collectively. Sometimes, it may help us more collectively than as individuals. There’s little evidence that watching more movies helps you live longer. In fact, studied have indicated the opposite may be true – but that may just be because of the sedentary aspect, and the vast quantities of necessary popcorn. But collectively, shared stories can help us make sense of the world – and might give a large group of people a slightly better likelihood of survival. Presumably.

And yet, only rarely do people engage in the arts with the intention of living longer, or helping our species live longer. We do it because we love the sounds and the views and the stories and the sense of proportion and beauty. We could say that all of these boons – beauty and sensual appeal and story – are related to our evolutionary survival, and sure, in a roundabout way, that’s probably true. But it’s unlikely that it’s as exact a fit as say, breathing in and breathing out is connected to our survival. The further we go out on an evolutionary tangent, the less likely that our activities will hew to their evolutionary origins. Human beings, especially, are a duct tape species – we are always repurposing things for other purposes, which may or may not have much to do, at least directly, with survival.

32. We thus have a lot of options with what we do with our time. “Survival of the fittest” is a statistical tendency, not a moral maxim. The question that greets us in the morning is not “how do I propagate the species and live forever,” but “what is the best, most beautiful, kindest, noblest, most moral most fun way to be alive, in this fleeting moment in time?”

It’s very possible that the answer could be, sometimes, that the best and most moral thing to do is to work towards the survival of ourselves and the species. But survival is not the primary question. Freedom precedes survival, morally speaking.

33. An ordinary and precious side effect of all this knowledge of the human condition is compassion. You don’t need to write meandering philosophical essays to understand that life is hard and consciousness is hard. We learn this every day, if we have the slightest sliver of moral sense. And looking at just how hard it is for every human – and other life forms, too – hopefully we are inspired to be a little gentler towards ourselves and each other. Even the people we don’t like have it incredibly hard. We are remarkable little lumps of entropy-denying matter, fighting a losing battle against time, trying to make the most of it in the hear-and-now. A little kindness towards each other would be a very good thing.

34. This essay might be accused of proffering a reductionist model of the universe: it doesn’t talk much about God, parallel universes, past and future lives, consciousness being foundational for matter instead of the other way around, or the possibility of entropy going in two directions.

Entropy itself is easy to observe – if not as a general law, then at least anecdotally. Pour a glass of water on the floor, and watch how, removed from the unifying powers of the glass, it tends to spread out. We all can see how, without help, stuff tends to be broken down by time.

But is entropy the only game in town? What if there is more to the story than “things fall apart”?

It’s a good question, and there’s no real reason to suppose that the universe is only what we can observe. Why wouldn’t there be more out there than we know? What makes us so smart, as to know everything – or even a smidgen of everything?

Science will often come to conclusions like “we don’t know what’s happening here, but based on the data, there must be something happening here we don’t yet know about.”

And as for religion – well you know how fond we are at talking about things we can’t see, or directly observe.

I wanted to make these pondering as non-hypothetical as possible. I wanted to focus on the basics of our current scientific model of the universe. Because I’m not a scientist, only a reader of the occasional popular science book, the best I can do is probably an outdated model of the universe from forty years ago. But basically, I didn’t want to add a lot of hypothetical bells and whistles to “just the facts, Ma’am.”

35. I will say this though – and this may veer from true philosophical rigor, but Imma say it anyway. Whatever other model of the universe we use for our pontificating on the meaning of it all, if it doesn’t inspire at least as much compassion as this model, then fuck that shit. Human history is replete with intellectual justifications for cruelty towards our fellow sufferers on this earth. There are so many theories of “it’s OK if they suffer, because we’re more important.” And each and every one of these pseudo-justifications is a cruel farce and an insult to humanity. There is plenty of suffering already in the universe, but these theories needlessly compound it.

It could be argued that suffering is somehow intended to be part of the framework of the universe. But I’ll say it again for the people in the back: if other models of the universe don’t inspire at least as much compassion as the entropic model of universal suffering, than fuck that shit. We have no philosophical obligation to hew to a view of the world that makes us worse people – just because we think it “might be right” – and every moral obligation not to do so.

36. ’ll end this little essay with some remarks about love, or how to talk to interesting people at parties. 

Clumps of inorganic matter is attracted to each other by gravity, molecular bonds, magnetic force, and so on. Without these laws of attraction, matter wouldn’t clump together, and entropy – the law of the soupy universe – would take over real quick.

Organic matter is subject to the same forces as inorganic matter – but it has a few other tricks up its sleeve as well. While interacting with its environment, life propels itself towards or away from other things, including other organisms – attraction or repulsion.

An organism’s reason for repulsion is often pretty simple: “if I get too close to this thing, I could die.” A predator, a sandstorm, acute embarrassment – whatever it is, the organism perceives a threat to its form, and heads promptly in the opposite direction.

Organisms are also attracted to stuff though, for many reasons. Something could be delicious to eat (or photosynthesize, or oxidize, or whatever it is that fungi do to their food). A nice dark log might be attractive as a place to hide in. Light could attract an animal looking to find its way, and a bumblebee could “attract” a plant looking to get its pollen out there into the world. Animals are attracted to other friendly organisms that help them survive – often of the species, though most species have friends out there from other species, too. And, of course, animals often are attracted sexually to others of the same species (as are plants, though their sex life is a lot wilder than ours).

37. That we should be attracted to something goes slightly against the prevailing winds of homeostasis. An organism wants to preserve its form against both internal breakdown and outside threats. This fosters a kind of primal innate suspicion of the outside world, because anything outside of ourselves bears the possibility of changing our internal conditions, and threatening or ending the bodily form that homeostasis is there to protect. In other words, outside stuff can kill you. This includes, of course, outside organisms, which can include predators and viruses and all sorts of stuff that can totally ruin your Tuesday.

But we also need the outside world to survive. We need energy and sources of energy, pretty much all the time. If we are a species that reproduces sexually, we need others to propagate the species (this is not to be used as a Tinder tagline – and avoided if anyone has). We need rocks to crawl under and water to move us along. And we could use a few friends and allies – others, of our species or another, that are kind enough to help us along the way.

38. In English, we say “I’d love a pizza with mushrooms”, using the same word that we use on the altar with our beloved. No disrespect to pizza, but there seem to be big, real differences between these feelings.

But let’s start with the similarities: in both instances we are expressing a state of attraction, a positive valence towards someone or something. There is something in it that draws us outside of ourselves, tempts us to take a risk into the world. We move towards the cheese pizza and take a bite, or we formally commit to a lifetime of companionship and care. In a world where outside stuff can kill us, attraction draws us out into the world of risk. The hoped-for reward that makes this risk worthwhile, can be as basic as daily sustenance, or a lot more nuanced.

39. One way in which a good life partner is different from a pizza with mushrooms, is that a pizza with mushrooms almost never has our best interests at heart – or vice versa. With friends and loved ones, there is ally-ship: we are looking out for each other. Small wonder that organisms pursue forms of all-ship – there is a pretty clear mutual benefit there. You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours, you might say.

Sometimes this sense of concern is one-sided. We often love our babies, but boy, are newborn babies ever selfish. But we’re totally OK with that, 4 a.m. tantrums notwithstanding: we have such a deep and profound concern for them, and we understand – difficult though it can be at 4 a.m. – that they are incapable of returning the concern. So this ally-ship is not just crude mutual benefit.

Some form of mutual benefit is pretty widespread, however. With most of our relationships, the other person or animals wants what’s best for us, and we want what’s best for them. Not only that, but in a good friendship, the other person will act on that desire, when the opportunity arises. Often, the mere fact that someone wants what’s best for us is, in itself, a beautiful thing. Just to know that somebody cares means a lot. But to know that someone – and not just anyone, but someone we actually like – would actively go out of their way to make our lives better…well, that’s better than gold.

40. But it’s not only – or even primarily – the tangible benefits of ally-ship that make love and friendship so important to us. The organism’s fight against entropy can feel pretty lonely. It’s our form we are preserving, after all, so it’s probably natural that we sometimes tend to think that it’s down to us, and us alone, to preserve that form. So the felt awareness that someone else has a genuine interest in our well-being can be uplifting, or even transformative.

We human beings are social creatures, so it’s not at all unnatural or unusual that someone else would have an interest in our well-being. The fact that we’re here testifies to the fact that someone took care of us when we were a helpless babe-in-arms. Still, though, because consciousness is so often geared toward self-preservation, we seem to be a bit surprised that anyone else cares at all. Perhaps this sense of surprise is more unique to Western/American civilization, where, arguably, we live ever more isolated lives, severed from our natural web of human relationships, and feeling ever  more alone. But I suspect, to some degree, human consciousness always tends to revert back to the delusion, unsupported by the evidence, that we are in this alone. It’s a common self-defense mechanism of homeostasis to revert back to “it’s just me.” And so we are continually, and blessedly, pleasantly surprised that there are others out there who give a damn.

41. If there were only other people who cared about us, that would be enough (“Dayenu”, as they say in Judaism) –  but actually love is about a lot more than that. Wait, there’s more! People often to say, “it is better to love, than to be loved.”  This may sound like a phrase said grudgingly, a false consolation after a certain someone doesn’t return your calls. But it’s true in an important sense, and imma tell you why.

As previously stated, life’s a bummer because it comes to an end, and doubly a bummer because we know it comes to an end. But what really makes it a bummer is we don’t want it to come to an end. After all, lots of things come to an end that we don’t mind all that much, like the seventh season of How I met Your Mother. But our whole being has been designed – our whole lumpiness has been shaped – with the goal of fighting against the ravages of entropy – an entropy that is bound to win in the end. It’s like we’re all the Washington Generals of existence – and existence itself is the Harlem Globetrotters. We’re always going to lose, and yet we’re built to try, haplessly and relentlessly, to win.

But when we truly care about something or someone outside of ourselves, we are released from this predicament. For a moment at least, we are liberated from the ongoing, ever-nagging worry about ourselves. And it is a liberation. We feel unburdened, for a time, of a struggle that has been with us our whole lives long. So much of our very being has been subtly organized to promote and pursue its own individual survival. But there’s a whole world out there: a world that is much more than just threats and boons (which is what our homeostasis translates everything into). There is a world that is fascinating and beautiful and cool, in its own right. And we are able to appreciate, through love, more of the beautiful nature of the universe, the deeper beauty of it. We step outside ourselves, and see the sunlit sky, that has always been there, waiting for us, if we get outside our own ego.

It may not last – the ego is pretty strong. But often, with practice and age, it lasts a little longer. We learn to live a bit more outside ourselves. And life no longer feels quite so desperate.

42. <Note: put answer here.>

43. So love is good for your sense of wonder and appreciation and gratitude. Love is good for you: but that’s the benefits of loving others from an individualist perspective. Selfishly, it’s good to love because loving helps us appreciate the world.

On a grander perspective, we can say: to love someone or something is to increase the total love. How incredible is it, that we get to say that? “I increased the total love of the universe today?” The universe would have less love in it, if you weren’t here. Go you!

You could bring up the question of how love can be measured, but if you do I’m just going to answer with something saccharine and quasi-mystical like “with the teaspoon of the heart”, so best just to skip it.

Every day, you get to add, not just to the total amount of love that the universe will have today, but also to the total amount of love the universe will ever have, in its eons and eons of existence. Do you have anything better to do today? I doubt it.

44. Quite a lot of philosophical ink has been shed on the question of whether the world can be said to have an independent existence outside of our perception of it. That discussion is above my pay grade, but it’s worth mentioning here that the outside universe has differences sorts of valences – lots of positive and negative associations – based on our natural point of view, the perspective that we necessarily view the universe from. ‘

I’ve already described how homeostasis can make us distrustful of the universe, because everything out there has the potential to kill us. The universe isn’t really out to get us. I mean, maybe you can say entropy is out to get everyone, if you really want to be Debbie Downer about it. But the vast majority of the universe neither knows nor cares that we exist – and of those few beings within our personal sphere of influence, a few may treat us as potential lunch, but another few are genuinely happy that we’re here. It’s only our homeostasis urge that sees everything as a potential threat. I suppose, in homeostasis’ defense, this fact is statistically true – anything could be a threat, we could choke on a dandelion somehow. But this distrust is really coming from us. It’s not an innate feature of the universe. It’s a lens, a way we look at the world because of our human condition.

 Fortunately, distrust is not our only lens for viewing reality. We also tend to appreciate and prize the felt experience of being alive. There’s obviously evolutionary rationale for this: the organism is geared towards preserve its own life, so naturally, it’s often going to have a positive valence towards the experience of being alive.

But let’s not be too mechanistic about this: it’s pretty awesome to go ice skating. Or to drink lemonade in the shade on a summer day. Or to go birdwatching with family. The momentary experiences of our lives, the sense impressions – the qualia – is where so much of the excitement, joy, and satisfaction of our lives derives from. Our qualia are shaped by the modulators of our experience. To put that in plainer English: when we’re having a nice experience of drinking coffee with friends, we have a flush of serotonin telling us “ohmigosh, it’s so nice to be with this gang again” and our brain, and different modulators respond “yum” to the sugar in the cronut, and so on. We have the felt experience, and all the valences – valences which are saying, “hey, yeah, this is the life.”

See, I knew we’d come back to qualia! In the qualia of our lives, we connect with the beauty of the universe.

Now, is the sunset really beautiful, objectively, or do we just think it is? That is to say, does the beauty exist in the sunset, or in us? Or in some relationship between the two?

I’m keeping this essay simple (though paragraph #44 is perhaps a little too late to say that), so we won’t delve much further into this chestnut. For our purposes, the point is that we are naturally inclined to fall in love with the sunset, and to view it positively.

Fear and cherishing are not the only two ways of relating to the world, of course. We are complicated and non-binary creatures. There is – to try and put simple labels to the complex tapestry of our emotional life – awe, sadness, curiosity, joy, anger, pity and oh so many more varieties of human experience. Someone could write a book about them.

45. I’ve tried to include different examples of devotion, attraction, and love here because we’re talking about all the ways an organism reaches outside itself, particularly an organism reaching outside itself to care about someone or something. Romantic love is just one of umpteen ways that we do that. Indeed, ascetics of multiple traditions eschew romantic love: all that mushy stuff can get in the way, they might argue, with adequately loving the whole world, or God.

Romantic love is great though, ay? As is friendship, and love of, and for, family. In these varied relationships, we always have the possibilities to learn new ways to go outside of ourselves, new ways to love the world. We make commitments – we define ourselves as more than just us as an individual. This happens on a deep level: over time, we may increasingly feel the homeostatic preservation towards the other person, to add to the usual homeostatic preservation towards ourselves. On a deep, bodily level, we consider them as part of us, to some degree. Family bonds can help with this co-consideration. And then there’s pregnancy: in pregnancy, a human being is gradually formed from our tissue, starting as just a bit of matter that we associate as part of our bodily form, and then taking on, over time, semi-independent and then more independent existence. So that’s pretty wild. Homeostatic identification with the other may thus happen early on, though admittedly you’d be better off asking someone who’s lived it.

Our romantic partners, friends and family teach us the wholeness of who we are. Relationships, even very good relationships, can be hard work. Pity the poor homeostatic urge, having to deal with another person, who is liable to surprise us, react to us, and change us. Danger, danger, danger! Both parties in a relationship are changed by the other, gradually, and sometimes dramatically. Loved ones are a huge shock to the system.

But it’s a shock that aligns us so much better with the universe. We really aren’t alone in the universe. It doesn’t revolve around us. Love is constantly asking us to get that fact into our stubborn heads. One of the benefits of embodying that fact, is that we no longer fear our own death quite so much. Death is still hard to fathom: we are so used to our own consciousness that, though we may factually understand what death means, it’s hard to imagine the thought-train suddenly stopping. Furthermore, we can only get to know the consciousness of others secondhand. Nevertheless, there is a kind of peace that seeps into our lives, when we know we aren’t alone.

46. We human beings can find so many objects of our love: abstract ideas like art, beauty, justice and wisdom; the stranger we know only through our belief in humanity; our animal companions; nature itself; God; learning; future states of affairs like world peace or better public transit; and so on. There is so much that can draw us outside of ourselves, kindle our devotion, and align us a little less with the constant homeostatic urge inside us, and a little more with the ever-changing universe. Perhaps – crafty, resourceful apes that we are, good at adapting to a variety of situations – we are also especially good at loving the world in a myriad of ways. You’re an exceptionally good lover. Didn’t you always want confirmation of that? Well, there you have it.

47. I promised I would tell you how to talk to interesting people at parties – I should first say, as a self-confessed dork and homebody, you probably shouldn’t take any advice on socializing from me. I do like parties though. And I’ll offer this: generally, all you have do is be in love with the world. Be grateful for it and curious about it. You don’t have to be in love with the whole world. You can start anywhere: with a love of board games, or your pet parakeet, or grammar, or your Mom, who’s done a lot for you. Just love a little bit of the world with an earnestness and a sincerity. And then, when you show up at the party, two things can easily happen. One, people will glean that you’re someone who loves the world with earnestness and sincerity. This recognition will happen even if they’re not boardgamers like you (which, admittedly, is a tragedy): they’ll see that you are capable of loving something well. And, then you’ll already be practiced at curiosity, attention, receptivity – the various practices of love, which you can then devoto to your neighbor. Boom. Great conversation ahead.

If that advice isn’t specific enough: just talk about dinosaurs. Everybody loves dinosaurs.  

48. I would guess that quite a lot of us walk around with a fairly constant sense of dread and anxiety, brought about by the human condition. For some of us, it might be almost minor, mostly live-able: just a sort of buzzing noise, a background Memento Mori. For others, it’s almost unbearable. Or actually unbearable.

For those suffering the dread and anxiety that often comes with being alive, first of all my genuine sympathies are with you. It’s not easy.

And also, this: I have kinda good news, really bad news, even worse news, and some genuinely good news for you.

The kinda good news is that quite a lot of the stuff that gives you dread will not come to pass. As a quote attributed to the great Mark Twain has it, “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.” Our minds are adept at coming up with scary possibilities. That’s useful in some ways, but it can also be kind of annoying. It’s good to remind ourselves that a huge amount of mental chatter is dedicated to bad stuff that won’t ever actually happen. This means that life is better, on average, than we think it is.

Now for the bad news: some of that stuff will happen. And some other stuff, that your diligent homeostatic-driven consciousness somehow failed to anticipate, will come out of the blue and surprise you. The wheels will come off the car now and then. You’re going to lose stuff. Failure, in some form, is going to be a part of your earthly existence. You know this, I’m sure. Just being real with you.

And the even worse news is similar: it’s all gonna come to an end. Entropy is going to win. We love a happy ending, because it satisfies our homeostatic urge, which is always fretting about the future. If only we were more geared towards yearning for a happy middle. I can promise you a happy middle. I can’t promise you a happy ending.

Which brings me to the genuinely good news: it’s beautiful out there. The birds are chirping, the sun is shining, there’s a breeze, or there isn’t, but either way, it’s grand. The water’s warm, and the food’s terrific. We are predisposed, perhaps, to be a little bit in love with life, even as we fear it. If so, that’s all to the good. We have the opportunity, today, to add to the total amount of love that is present throughout the span of the universe’s existence. You, my friend, can help us break the world record. I know you can do it. Come say hi to me at the party. I love you.