Our Greatest Delusion

I'm not sure what I expected to find when I went to Chernobyl. I mean, it's been so long since the nuclear reactor there melted down and spewed radioactive atoms across the land. So for almost thirty years, this place has been virtually abandoned. These days, workers are allowed into the zone, but only for two weeks at a time. And that's not because the levels of radiation are too high, it's actually for psychological reasons. More than two weeks in a place like this will apparently make you think strange things.

And I was only here for four days, but I started to think about rocks. Yeah... rocks. Rocks appear to be permanent. I mean, I know that they aren't. Mountains are constantly eroding, and in places, the crust is melting back into the mantle. Rock obviously isn't permanent, but on the scale of a human life, it is, and people recognized that fact—rocks are permanent—for thousands of years, and I think that's what makes them important to us. I mean, "a diamond is forever."

We build these monuments out of rock because they will outlast us and virtually every other material we can think of. Our modern structures of metal and glass are just rock refined by our ingenuity. Rocks are both practical and symbolic. We seek to identify ourselves with rocks. We carve our heroes in stone because we want them to last forever, and there's a way in which we want that kind of permanence for ourselves too. I think it's in the core of the desire to scratch our name into stone, put your initials in wet cement—really man-made rock—or fasten a padlock to a bridge. In this way, we try to push our impermanence from our minds.

The monuments, statues, and bridges, they give us a sense of continuity, stability. That this is the way it is and the way it's always been. Like the way we first conceived of stars: static, unchanging, eternal. And this way of viewing the world helps us maintain our greatest delusion: the thought that we are in any way eternal. We want to believe that some part of us, our consciousness or our soul, will last forever. But what do you make of it then when you see stone is not even so permanent?

Walking around Chernobyl, I think it's understandable I started contemplating not only the permanence of rocks but also their decay, and by extension, our decay, death, and what the world would look like without people. You know, the closest I can come to imagining true nothingness is to picture the universe running really fast in reverse. All the galaxies squeezing closer together, stars expanding back into gas clouds, and everything getting hotter and denser, compactifying until the whole observable universe could fit into a room and then sinking further into a tiny point and then... nothing. Not the nothingness of empty space but real nothingness which has no size and no time. To me, that is probably what death looks like—a nothingness so complete you wouldn't even miss it. For that, you'd have to be there.

But just as soon as I can form this thought, it evaporates like a void in nature. The world rushes in to fill it. And this makes sense because the hardware I'm running has been developed over billions of years, with the only requirement being that it frequently and accurately makes copies of itself. It would help not in the slightest in the goal of making copies if the hardware could accurately simulate its own non-existence.

When we do acknowledge our impermanence, it is often through insipid catchphrases like "YOLO" or it's in art projects like Damien Hirst's "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living," which is just a huge shark in a tank of formaldehyde. A sense of our mortality should strike fear into us, like the sense I have when I'm swimming hundreds of meters offshore and the water below is deep and dark, and I can picture the shark swimming beneath me. The same kind of fate stalks us daily, but not in this visceral way—just in a trivial, ignorable way. Hence the delusion.

You're permanent like stone, always were and always will be. So we are left hardwired for denial, a selected inability to imagine true nothingness, an ephemeral sack of particles that thinks itself eternal. This delusion is comforting, and it makes living easier. It might drive you crazy to be confronted with the ultimate meaninglessness of everything all the time—what we call nihilism. But the same delusion, I'd argue, is also debilitating.

It lulls you into a false sense of security, inaction, like a due date a long time in the future. There's always tomorrow, so we procrastinate living the life we truly desire, and we live in more fear. The sense that your soul is eternal makes you cowardly because failure would stick with you forever. For really ever. Shame, embarrassment, disappointment—they would never leave you. A distant horizon encourages you to play it safe. Live to fight another day, for after all, there is always another day.

And this is why I find nihilism liberating and emboldening. If you can really picture the nothingness that awaits you, then what is there to be afraid of? Errors and humiliations will be forgotten, but great achievements may not. We may have no meaning in the cosmic context of the universe, but we make our own meaning daily with each other, and this is the thought that leads to action: your days are numbered, you don't know what that number is, but it's finite, so get busy with what it is you want to do. Time is running out.