somwehere along the line consciousness discovered it was conscious and we've been trying to recover ever since.
zoom out.
our elaborate systems look like theater props under scrutiny. morning commutes become ballets of metal boxes, dancers who've memorized their steps but forgotten why they dance. office buildings stand as concrete hives, their inhabitants scurrying through fluorescent corridors with the determined purposelessness of worker bees.
zoom out.
we cope in fascinating ways. like actors who've realized they're in a play but choose to improvise harder. some sprint into nihilism's cold embrace - nothing matters, therefore everything permitted. others build fortresses of certainty - religion, ideology, career, legacy. they stack belief-bricks higher and higher, hoping to build towers tall enough to reach truth.
but there's another path. stare directly at meaninglessness and create meaning anyway. become jazz musicians who know the melody is made up but play with complete conviction regardless.
zoom out further.
we construct civilizations while carrying the peculiar awareness that we're cosmic accidents on a rock hurtling through space. we build empires and algorithms, skyscrapers and stock markets, while fundamentally unable to explain our own existence.
existence offers no user manual, no satisfaction guaranteed, no customer service line for existential crises. we're all just improvising.
zoom in slightly.
the more we examine reality, the blurrier it gets. we're children with microscopes discovering that solid things are mostly empty space. every answer spawns new questions. every explanation needs explaining.
we create philosophical frameworks to systematically explain why systems can't explain everything. gather in universities to seriously discuss meaninglessness. write books about the limitations of writing books. organize our doubts about organization.
zoom in closer.
our lives overflow with containers. pill organizers segment survival into morning and night. ring boxes hold promises we pretend last forever. moving boxes store past versions of ourselves in parents' attics, gathering dust beside christmas decorations and report cards.
we sort existence into spreadsheet cells. compress memories into photo albums. flatten feelings into emoji reactions. translate love into dating app algorithms. reduce consciousness to chemical equations. infinity stuffed into finite spaces, spilling over edges.
zoom out again.
human time bends reality. we slice infinity into years, months, days, hours, seconds. build lives around arbitrary divisions. monday meetings. friday drinks. summer vacations. winter holidays. as if the cosmos cares about calendars.
but time isn't what we pretend. it stretches and warps. five minutes in meditation becomes an hour. hours with someone beloved pass in minutes. watched pots never boil until you turn away.
zoom in.
even our attempts to cope with absurdity become absurd. we develop mindfulness practices to accept the present moment, then worry we're not accepting correctly. make memes about how nothing matters, which end up mattering. join communities to share our fundamental isolation.
consciousness observing itself is reality's greatest magic trick. like a dog chasing its tail, except the dog is thoughts and the tail is awareness. the moment we try to observe our own consciousness, it transforms. always just out of reach, like trying to bite your own teeth.
we are mirrors reflecting mirrors reflecting mirrors, creating infinite recursions of awareness that somehow add up to self. we fall asleep and wake up, somehow convinced we're the same entity, like a ship that has had every part replaced yet still carries the same name.
pause.
when we stop expecting the universe to validate our existence, we can start validating it ourselves.
this isn't philosophical cope - it's a practical framework for living in chaos. when we stop expecting reality to make sense, we become more resilient to nonsense. we develop an existential immune system that doesn't reject the absurd but learns to dance with it.
zoom in.
we are meaning-makers in a meaningless universe. children building sandcastles at the edge of an infinite ocean. we know the tide will come. we build anyway. decorate our castles with shells and seaweed, dig moats and build bridges, create entire kingdoms knowing they won't last the night.
zoom in closer.
camus was right about sisyphus. not because eternal boulder-rolling is meaningful, but because sisyphus chose to own his condition. to find meaning in straining muscles and stone-gripped hands. in the rhythm of persistence. in the defiant joy of doing it anyway.
zoom in until everything blurs.
in a universe that offers no answers, that might be our most profound response: to acknowledge the absurd, embrace it, and choose to live fully anyway. to keep rolling our various boulders up our chosen hills, knowing they'll roll back down, and to laugh anyway.
after all, the void isn't going to stare back at itself. while we're here, we might as well make it interesting. might as well make it beautiful. might as well make it mean something - even if that meaning lasts no longer than a sandcastle at high tide.
zoom in until you can see the atoms dance.
zoom in until meaning dissolves.
zoom in, zoom in, zoom in.