Nothingness
“I feel no real reason to live.” you said.
I sat for hours thinking of what I’d tell you that could have even a small chance at changing your mind. The scrambled letters floating around inside my head, however, refused to pull themselves together. Knowing you’d never even consider doing the unspeakable, sinking into nothingness and forgetting you’d ever said anything seemed like my most viable option.
The thing is, you’re wrong. You think you’ve got life figured out. You’ve summed it up into a few distinct experiences. Love, lust, heartbreak and pain. Unrelenting pain. You seem to think that everything needs to end in pain. That you’ve felt every kind of pain there is to feel, so why make the additional effort to continue on? Yes, everything ends. It has to. That is the nature of the universe that we all must come to terms with, one way or another.
Nothing truly ends, though. Not to us. Humanity has the extraordinary capability and capacity to immortalize even the smallest of things using the many tools at our immediate disposal.
“Why try?” you might ask.
Why try.
To try is all we can do. That is why. Without life, without getting up every day and drudging through the same pile of shit to find some solace in something small and seemingly insignificant, what would there be? Nothing. Nothing at all. Just as the way it was for you before you were born. To you, there was absolutely nothing — and that’s how it will be afterwards (ignoring the possibility of heaven and hell).
Earth is but a mere speck of dust, suspended in space. It has inhabited life for billions of years, and will continue to do so long after our species is dead, returned to the dirt from which we came. In the unfathomable amount of time this planet has existed, somehow you and I landed here, in the present. We have the privilege of experiencing something as cosmically rare as our own civilization, as advanced as it has become in such a short amount of time. What’s more is that we get to experience it together. It’s remarkable no matter how you look at it.
I struggle to ensure that I’m never drawing comparisons between our lived experiences when we have meaningful conversations. Neither of us had any real control of the things that happened to us, so for me to get up on my high horse and tell you about how easy you’ve had it compared to myself or anyone else would be downright hypocritical. But I feel an innate need to tell you that your perspective matters, and that it can always change.
How amazing are the lives we live? Of all the 108 billion people who have ever lived, you’re you. You’ll live through so many amazing things in your lifetime. To see you disregard the limitless potential for happiness we both know you have… It breaks my heart.
Love,
Joel
