Hello Friends, Family, and Fans;
As I lay down to sleep last night, fighting a migraine and hearing Pegasus coughing, I was hit with the absurdity of life. On a microscopic scale we are nothing but a sapient world filled with billions of life forms, every cell in our body living and dying in an instant. On a macroscopic scale we’re specs of dust in an uncaring universe, our planet was formed and will be destroyed in a blink of a cosmic eye.
What brought on this existential drama? Chocolate Raspberry coffee.
I was waxing nostalgic about the chocolate raspberry coffee I used to drink in university. You know, back in the old days when Trump was a comedic reality star, TikTok was the sound clocks made, and social media was LiveJournal, MySpace, and MSN Messenger.
Back then, I was working three jobs, going to university full time, volunteering, and horribly burnt out. (Closeted and undiagnosed) However, it felt like the world made sense, like it had rules. Those rules were often unfair, but they were there.
I know now that I was naive. The world doesn’t follow any real rules, and this past decade has proven that over and over again. Humans are so desperate for order that we are easily deceived by grifters and a good story.
But nihilistically, it doesn’t matter. We’re all going to die and be forgotten. In a thousand years, everything and everyone we care about will be forgotten dust, and in five billion years our planet and race will be completely forgotten. Nothing really matters in the long run. Not tariffs, not disease, not the book I’m struggling to write, NOTHING.
So if nothing matters, than what’s the point? If it doesn’t matter, what is our pain and struggle for?
There are two ways to deal with understanding our impermanence: you can choose selfishness or kindness.
Like any binary, there’s an infinite amount of varieties in these two, but if you look at what’s going on around the word, at the hate, the fear, the war, and the suffering; it’s not hard to see that a lot of people have chosen selfishness.
If nothing matters, if we only have this short amount of time together, what’s the point of amassing wealth? Of creating a legacy of money, business, or power? It’s all dust in the end. Just ask Ozymandias.
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart.[d] Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
— Percy Shelley, “Ozymandias”, 1819 edition
Kindness is the better option. It’s always the better option. Be kind to yourself, be kind to others, and be kind to the world.
Since we’re just tiny blips in the history of humanity, and completely irrelevant to the history of the universe, why not make the time we have be pleasant. If there is a God, he’ll agree, if there isn’t, you’ve made your life and those around you a little better, and that might not mean anything in the long term, but in the short term it’s the only thing that matters.
Choose Kindness,
Éric
