The Real Meaning of Life

Life is hard. I bought a new pair of shoes the other day, walked outside into the rain, and ended up stepping into some mud. Now they're ruined, and I'm bitter. But then I took a step back—not literally, of course—but I really thought about it, and I came to the conclusion that nothing in life really matters.

Here's why: The earth has been around for four-and-a-half billion years. One day, humans became a thing, and we became conscious. This world seemed perfect for us; it wasn't scorching hot, it wasn't deathly cold. We fit right in the middle. The gravity on Earth was perfect; it allowed us to move and run and catch animals that conveniently existed for us humans to eat. There was water to drink; there was oxygen to breathe. It's as if we were put here for a reason.

We began creating things. We began working together as a species, building empires, covering the planet, and fighting each other for whatever reason. Fast forward a couple million years, and here we are today: computers, rockets, Elon Musk—they are all here. Somewhere along the line, we also, in a way, created something out of nothing. It's called time.

We've laid out definitions of time—seconds, minutes, hours, years—but it doesn't really matter. We've made those for our own use. Time is nothing more than a way to measure the passing of events, but we've only really set up these units of time based off of ourselves. A day is how long it takes the earth to spin around once. A month is about how long it takes the moon to orbit the earth and also spin around once. A year is how long it takes the earth to orbit the Sun once.

You get about 78 earth revolutions around the Sun in this journey called life. As poetic as that sounds, there’s not much scale to these things. Once we pass a human lifetime, sure, we can judge how long a thousand or maybe even ten thousand years are, but after that, the timescales of things are just too much for our brains to handle.

As much as you think you understand the 13.8 billion year lifespan of the universe, you really can't put that into an imaginable scale on the scale of a human life. The universe is unbelievably old, but in terms of the universe's lifespan, pretty much nothing has happened yet—it's barely even started.

We can make predictions about the next hundreds of trillions of years of the universe's life. We can figure out when our Sun is going to blow up. We can figure out when our galaxy is going to collide with another. We can come up with theories that describe why the universe we've been put into is expanding faster than anything else physically possible. But yet, we have zero idea what happened in the fraction of a second between when there was nothing and when there was something.

For some reason, as far as we can tell, we're the only conscious beings to have ever existed, but we don't even know what being conscious is. We developed consciousness only to be aware of the fact that nothing else is there—growth so aware of our surroundings that the smarter we get, the smaller we become.

As this thing we call time goes on, we begin to realize things—things that prove that the universe probably wasn't made just for us. You are most likely born in a hospital; if not, props to you for making it this far. Back then, you were your parents' entire world for a small time, which is cute, but you aren't everything.

360 thousand people are born each day. Of all of those people with the same birthday, some are going to do big things and change the world; others are just gonna die. That just happens. But Earth is just one planet in our solar system; there are eight or nine of those for now.

For life as we know it to exist, it's kind of hard to believe that there might be other life out there. It takes so much to happen for us to be able to exist. We've discovered over 4000 exoplanets to date—planets that don't revolve around our Sun—and we found multiple examples of earth-like planets, roughly the same shape, size, temperature. But yet, there's nothing there from what we can tell.

So if there are so many planets that could have life, why haven't we seen it yet? Why are there no signs? Well, we're just one solar system in...