Chapter Content
Okay, so, like, what's the meaning of life, right? That's the question. It's, uh, it's a big one. It's got layers, you know? So I'm gonna give you, like, three answers, maybe.
First, the meaning of life is, like, a personal thing. Each person, you gotta find it for yourself, you know? Any wisdom that anyone gives you, even the Buddha, even me, it's gonna sound like, well, baloney. You gotta sit down, like, really think about it, dig deep. It might take years, even decades, to figure it out. But once you find something that clicks, that's it, that becomes your foundation, your reason for being.
Second, maybe there isn't any meaning to life, any purpose. I mean, some people say, "Life is like writing in water or building a house on sand." You know? The universe has been around for billions of years, and it'll probably be around for billions more. Your life? It's, like, nothing compared to that. You weren't here for the first billions, you won't be here for the next. And eventually, the universe is just gonna, like, fizzle out, heat death, they call it.
Everything you do will fade away. No trace of you will be left. Humanity will be gone, Earth will be gone. Even if we colonize Mars, that'll disappear too. Doesn't matter if you're an artist, a poet, a conqueror, a beggar, whatever, generations later, nobody will remember you. So, yeah, maybe life justโฆ doesn't have any inherent meaning.
Ultimately, a person has to create their own meaning, right? You gotta figure out: Is life just a play, and I'm just a spectator? Am I doing things for self-fulfillment? Is my desire for something justโฆ itself? All these are meanings you're making up, you know?
Because, for the universe, there's no, like, fundamental purpose or meaning. And even if there was, and you found out what it was, you'd just ask, "But why *that*?" Like, the physicist Richard Feynman said, it's like, "It's turtles all the way down." There's always another "why," you know? Any answer just leads to another "why."
And, personally, I don't buy the whole "eternal afterlife" thing. Just 'cause you lived for, like, 70 years on this planet, you get an eternal afterlife? I just think that's, like, ridiculous, unfounded. I think the afterlife is, like, the before-life, you know? Do you remember your before-life? No? Well, the afterlife's probably the same.
Before you were born, there wasn't a "you." You didn't care about anything, anybody, including the people you loved, including yourself, including humanity, whether we colonize Mars or stay on Earth, whether there's artificial intelligence... nothing. And when you die, the "you" disappears, and you won't care about any of it then either.
Third answerโฆ This one's a bit, uh, complicated. Based on some science books I've been reading, and a friend of mine writes about this kind of stuff, I've, like, cobbled together a theory. Maybe life *does* have a meaning and purpose, but maybe it's not a purpose you're gonna like.
Basically, in physics, the arrow of time comes from entropy. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that over time, entropy only increases, it never decreases. That means disorder in the universe goes up, concentrated free energy goes down. So if you think of any living thing, like a human or a plant, or even a civilization, as a system, these systems are, like, locally *decreasing* entropy. We're making things more ordered, not less.
But while we're locally decreasing entropy, the whole Earth, and the universe, is overall increasing entropy, heading towards heat death. And with this heat death thing, you can come up with some interesting explanations, and I like them. In this state, the energy isn't concentrated, and everything has an equal energy level. Everything is one and the same, identical.
So as living systems, everything we do is, like, accelerating the universe towards heat death. Creating art, doing math, building families, inventing computers, creating civilizations... all these more complex systems are speeding up the universe towards its ultimate heat death. You're just pushing us to the ultimate "everything is one" thing.