The Great Perhaps

aheadfullofempty:

mutualaddiction:

aheadfullofempty:

mutualaddiction:

aheadfullofempty:

mutualaddiction:

laughingcloud:

sylvia plath

maybe that is why people do those things
because they know one day they are going to die
and they don’t give a fuck 

I more think of it as- your life has no cosmic significance and because of inevitable death, everything you do is silly or meaningless. Like worrying about how many calories you just ate and having a whole conversation with someone about it- it’s silly. You’re a future dead body eroding away forever in nothingness after being one of billions on a rock smaller than a speck of dust in an infinite universe and a life the length of a camera flash.

It’s funny, I actually took the reverse meaning out of this, somehow. Maybe I read it backwards. I always think it’s silly to ascribe meaning to things based on their relative size in the dimensions of space and time. Or, rather - to lose track of the fact that relatively small things are probably very important to other relatively small things. We might be small and short-lived in comparison to the universe, but we don’t really see the universe, do we? We see our streets, houses, and countries. We tend to measure our time in minutes and days, not millenia. What’s important to an ant may seem like a speck of dust to a human, but that doesn’t make it less important to that ant.

(That sounded a lot less weird and complicated in my head.)

While I do see your point, I still think that if something is meaningful to something meaningless, it’s still meaningless. That’s not to say that I don’t live my life the best I can while I’m here, or I’m just as happy with a person being a mass murderer as an activist or scientist, but we’re just so small and while Hitler’s life choices vs. Martin Luther King’s matter a great deal to us, they really don’t matter. I guess that must sound crazy or sad but I can’t help but think of the silence and infinite expansion of space and time and the noise of the human race and all our petty problems and how they don’t matter- and they won’t matter- oh wait where’s that Carl Sagan quote…aaaand found it- “Long ago, when an early galaxy began to pour light out into the surrounding darkness, no witness could have known that billions of years later some remote clumps of rock and metal, ice and organic molecules would fall together to make place called Earth; or that life would arise and thinking beings evolve who would one day capture a little of that galactic light, and try to puzzle out what had sent it on its way. And after the earth dies, some 5 billion years from now, after it’s burned to a crisp, or even swallowed by the Sun, there will be other worlds and stars and galaxies coming into being — and they will know nothing of a place once called Earth.” So if you think of one unuttered thought in one human’s head in one minute of one day of their 86.5 years of life on one rock in one galaxy in a universe.. It’s just ridiculous. Yes it seems important to us but it is shutter-inspiringly unimportant in the context of an infinite expanse of time and the universe. And it doesn’t matter if it matters to us because all things are impermanent; especially your worries, your body, and humankind itself. Even if some don’t choose to think of things in the context of the cosmos but rather days, streets, years..That is the true context of our existence.

That’s what I’m saying, though - all of that is irrelevant, because the context is our own experience. Everything in existence is relative to our size, our time, our subjective sense of meaning. We are not the universe, so it doesn’t matter what the rest of the universe does, how vast it is, or how long it’s going to be there after the entire human race is dead. That shit doesn’t matter in the least bit. What’s important is what I’m going to eat for dinner today, whether America is going to go to war with Iran, and how awesome the next punk show I go to is going to be. Because our meaning is subjective and relative to our existence - the vastness of the universe has nothing to do with it.

tl;dr I’ve never liked astronomers.

Yeah..I guess man. Just can’t seem to ignore that stuff

Word. I know the feeling, I guess I just have my perspective in a different place. Slightly less “big picture”. That’s cool though.

And we did expand it a bit from the original quote- how do you feel about the quote itself?