The Good News Is: Nothing Matters. The Bad News Is: Nothing Matters

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:02]So, I was making coffee the other morning and I had this thought that one day everyone I know will be gone. Everyone they know will be gone. Um the whole project of human civilization, everything we've built and argued about and lost sleep over will eventually be nothing.

[00:00:31]The sun will expand. The earth goes bye-bye.

[00:00:36]And eventually even the universe itself winds down into a very cold and dark featureless equilibrium.

[00:00:46]And I'm thinking about about all this and I still had to answer three emails before noon and pay some bills.

[00:00:56]So just a typical start to my day really. Now, I don't know about you, but um I find the contrast between the scale of, you know, what we're floating inside of and the utter insignificance of what we're asked to care about on any given day.

[00:01:22]I find this either cosmically absurd or unbearable, depending on my mood, I guess.

[00:01:30]sometimes both at once and and then that's its own special rather entertaining experience.

[00:01:39]I think it's entirely possible that existence is a cosmic joke.

[00:01:46]But I guess that then raises the question, well, who wrote the joke and who's laughing, right?

[00:01:55]And I thought this thought about this for a while because I think the setup for this joke is it's almost too good. I mean, you've got a species that it's self-aware enough to understand its own insignificance. It's conscious enough to suffer about things that may never happen, usually never do happen, and yet somehow still expected to maintain something like a resume and uh you know have opinions about I don't know parking or some other mundane But I keep thinking that even if the universe is indifferent and it does seem pretty committed to that position, we still have to live inside the experience.

[00:02:58]And I think that you know once you're conscious and once you can reflect on suffering and time and uh other people's pain and so forth.

[00:03:18]I think at that point, ethics stops being optional, which I guess is inconvenient, but well, there you have it.

[00:03:33]So, here's the thing about being human.

[00:03:38]Um, we are the only animal, as far as anybody knows, that can lie awake at 3:00 in the morning worrying about something that hasn't happened yet and might never happen. And even if it does happen, we can't do anything anything about it at 3:00 in the morning. Right now, all right, take a deer on the other hand.

[00:04:04]you know, when it's not being chased, it's basically fine. It stands in the field or the woods or wherever eating vegetation.

[00:04:14]It doesn't have a complicated uh relationship with its own mortality like we do.

[00:04:23]Uh meanwhile, humans invented things like oh lovely things like tax software and uh existential dread. And you know, amazingly, we've somehow managed to actually make both of those things worse every year.

[00:04:42]And I think at the root of this is uh well self-awareness basically which I know sounds like a gift and well arguably it is a gift except for the part where you realize that it comes fully loaded with things like ego and memory and this ability to imagine the future. future and and of course dwell in the past which we do and uh therefore we have this ability to suffer about things that exist entirely in our own heads.

[00:05:29]Now, of course, uh other animals experience pain and suffering. That goes without saying.

[00:05:38]But humans, well, we've been blessed to experience anticipatory grief, which means that we get to feel loss before the loss even happens. Isn't that special?

[00:05:59]So we can mourn futures that never arrive.

[00:06:03]We have this um I guess you could say this unfortunate ability to con to uh construct these elaborate psychological this elaborate psychological architecture around a thing that someone said to us 20 years ago. and then visit that architecture regularly for no productive reason whatsoever, which you have to admit that's pretty impressive in a I guess a sort of bleak perspective. Anyway, so in in um True Detective Rust Cole had this line about um human consciousness being like an evolutionary mistake and that nature produced something that was capable of reflecting on itself and in doing so it created a species that uh suffers in a Okay. That nothing else does.

[00:07:16]And to me, there's something there's something intriguing about that idea because consciousness it didn't arrive with a manual, right?

[00:07:31]It it didn't come with any instructions on how to hold the awareness of your own mortality without it becoming debilitating.

[00:07:46]It just shows up pretty much fully formed and then it says, "Okay, well, here you go.

[00:07:56]Uh, you are aware of time now."

[00:08:00]Oh, and and mortality.

[00:08:04]So, good luck with that.

[00:08:08]And I think what happens is the ego complicates this because the ego wants to matter. Of course, it wants permanence.

[00:08:17]It um it wants the story of its own existence to mean something that outlasts the existence itself.

[00:08:30]And the universe, as we'll get into, it's not particularly interested in cooperating with that.

[00:08:38]Now, I'm not saying that consciousness is nothing but a burden. There's a little magic involved in it, right? I mean, you've got music and uh sometimes love and then there's, you know, a lot of simple pleasures like, I don't know, a good meal on a cold day and things of that nature.

[00:09:00]And consciousness gets credit for that, too. It's just that you don't really get one without the other.

[00:09:11]The same equipment that lets you experience beauty is the same Well, it's the equipment that wakes you up at 4:00 a.m. doing probability calculations on things that you have zero control over.

[00:09:28]All right. So, let's talk about the scale of things because I think the most, you know, I think most people have um at least a vague intellectual understanding that the universe is absolutely massive, but they don't really let themselves feel what that means. And I think the reason for that is if you actually let yourself, you know, feel this, it it's pretty overwhelming and paralyzing. And, you know, you've got enough going on in your life then to be thinking about cosmic dread, right?

[00:10:18]Um, but hey, let's dive in anyway because, well, here we are.

[00:10:25]So the observable universe is about 93 billion light years across.

[00:10:34]Our galaxy alone contains something like 200 to 400 billion stars.

[00:10:42]Incomprehensible numbers.

[00:10:46]And the sun is so large that you can fit about a million earths inside it. And yet the sun is by cosmic standards it's pretty unremarkable. It's it's a medium-sized star in a medium-sized neighborhood of a pretty average galaxy.

[00:11:08]So humanity has existed for about 300,000 years.

[00:11:15]The universe is approximately approximately 13.8 billion years old.

[00:11:21]Which means if you were to compress cosmic history into a single calendar year, uh, humans show up sometime in the last few moments of December 31st.

[00:11:38]So everything we've ever done, every war, every symphony, every empire, every dad joke, everything, it all happened in the last couple of seconds before midnight.

[00:11:56]And at some point, the sun will expand into a red giant and the earth will be gone. And eventually the universe itself will it'll wind down into what physicists call heat death which is a state of it's a state of maximum entropy where nothing can happen because everything is equally distributed and there's no energy differential left to do anything with.

[00:12:31]So that's the um the destination just so we're oriented and the thing I f I find strange that knowing all this the cultural response has been to just double down on garbage like personal branding and to treat legacy and impact as though the cosmos has assigned quarterly performance reviews or something like that as though somewhere out there there's some colossal spreadsheet that's tracking whether you hit your goals this year.

[00:13:21]Well, it's it's not out there.

[00:13:26]Um there is no cosmic spreadsheet. not that I've been able to find. Anyway, if you haven't seen or or read about or seen the this video of Carl Sean's monologue about Earth being a pale blue dot, I I definitely definitely recommend checking that out. So he makes this pretty powerful case that the planet is it's like a a speck of dust that's it's suspended in a sunbeam and that there probably there's probably not a a a better demonstration of just the sheer folly of human conceits than than this distant image of our tiny planet planet.

[00:14:25]So Sean was also notably well he wasn't suggesting that we just stop caring about things. He just thought that we might want to recalibrate what we're certain about.

[00:14:45]And I think that recalibration, that's the hard part because the ego, you know, this is the same ego that wakes you up at 4:00 a.m. It doesn't really want to recalibrate anything. It wants to matter on a cosmic scale. It It just wants the universe to notice.

[00:15:08]Well, look, I hate to say it, but in all likelihood, the universe hasn't noticed it.

[00:15:18]And this is where I think it gets interesting because that indifference once you actually really let that sink in and don't flinch away from it, I think it starts feeling like sort of like a release and not so much like a verdict anymore.

[00:15:47]like, you know, maybe we were never supposed to be that significant in the first place. And maybe that's perfectly okay.

[00:15:56]I mean, I'm okay with that.

[00:16:03]All right. So there are a few ways that humans have tried to deal with all of this and none of them are perfect of course which is probably the most honest thing that I can say about any of them.

[00:16:20]So, nihilism is that's the one that gets the worst press, not surprisingly.

[00:16:28]And I get why, because when you take nihilism to its terminal point, it basically argues that nothing has inherent meaning, which sounds like a great excuse to just give up completely, right?

[00:16:47]Um, and for some people that's exactly what it becomes.

[00:16:53]You know, it's like it's like the philosophical justification for apathy dressed up in black clothing and a uh I guess a certain appearance at social events.

[00:17:05]However, if you don't let it consume you and you're willing to look at it from a different perspective, I think there's actually something in nihilism that's actually useful because well, nihilism has this way of well, it strips away any pretense or uh you know the sense that the universe is tracking your progress or or building towards some grand personal narrative or something. And I think once you stop just waiting for meaning to arrive from somewhere outside yourself, you're forced to deal with what's actually there.

[00:17:59]And that may be uncomfortable, but I think it's also the beginning of something more genuine.

[00:18:10]So, all right. So, then there's Albert Kimu and he looked at all of this and said, "Yeah, well, the universe is silent and yet we keep asking it questions anyway."

[00:18:26]And the gap between is what he called the absurd.

[00:18:33]But instead of responding with despair about this, Kimu responded with something closer to, I guess, what I'd call defiant participation.

[00:18:48]You just lean into it and keep going. You push the boulder and you do it again tomorrow.

[00:18:58]And somewhere in that repetition, something that functions like meaning starts to emerge.

[00:19:05]So Kimu cared it uh compared this to Sysphus who if you're not familiar was condemned by the gods to push a boulder up a hill over and over again for all eternity.

[00:19:20]Now, instead of seeing this as a punishment, Kimu suggested that maybe Seephus might have actually found a sense of purpose in this godforsaken task and therefore we found contentment in it.

[00:19:43]And I find myself thinking about this image sometimes, like I don't know, I guess when I'm reading um one of these headlines that sounds like a rejected dystopian satire from 20 years ago or something.

[00:20:02]And you know, the those head headlines are plentiful these days.

[00:20:10]And then um Buddhism arrives from a completely different uh direction and it says that our suffering comes from attachment and from I guess demanding permanence out of things that were always going to be temporary like you know relationships, um youth truth, uh, identity, um, like the version of yourself that you've decided you are, all of it's impermanent. All of it is moving whether or not you hold on to it or try to hold on to it. And the practice isn't to stop caring about anything. You still hold things, of course, but you just you're trying to hold them a little more loosely.

[00:21:15]Yeah, you have to hold them in a way where you you you understand that you're going to have to let go at some point.

[00:21:24]You know, it's kind of like I've mentioned this before, it's it's like the difference between carrying something and strangling it, right?

[00:21:35]And yeah, if you've been following this channel for a while, that's a distinction that keeps showing up because it just keeps being true, I suppose.

[00:21:47]So none of these these three traditions really agrees on much but they they do all arrive at something similar just from different directions. That the demand for some cosmic certainty is probably the source of more suffering than the uncertainty itself.

[00:22:16]I mean, look, unfortunately, the universe isn't going to explain itself.

[00:22:21]And the sooner that you can make peace with that, the mellower things are going to get, though, that's of course easier said than done.

[00:22:30]I understand.

[00:22:36]So, here's the question.

[00:22:38]If the universe is indifferent and if nothing has inherent meaning and we're just a brief um accidental species on a medium-sized rock orbiting an unremarkable star, then why does any of it matter? Why be good?

[00:23:05]Why care about anyone or anything at all? Right? Why not just focus completely on your own comfort and let everything else just uh sort itself out?

[00:23:20]And honestly, I think those are very valid questions.

[00:23:24]But I also think that this is where a lot of the um I guess internet nihilism goes wrong because it basically stops at the cosmic indifference part and treats that like it's a conclusion.

[00:23:46]And I'm not saying that that's not a possibility.

[00:23:50]I just think it's kind of like quitting a movie halfway through because you've already decided that uh you know the ending, but you might not.

[00:24:08]So, uh Sartra had this idea that humans are condemned to be free. And I think that's a rather pro provocative statement because what's what that's saying is that the responsibility of handling that freedom, it's completely yours alone.

[00:24:33]There's no predetermined co cosmic script for you to pull from. There's no divine authority handing down any instructions.

[00:24:44]There's no meaning that's encoded into the fabric of things. All there is is consciousness and making choices in the dark with incomplete information for as long as they last. And it's a lot to hand someone without a manual. you know though as we've established the manuals the manual was was never coming anyway.

[00:25:16]So the thing is even in an indifferent universe suffering it's still real to the people experiencing it.

[00:25:30]Love and loneliness are still real.

[00:25:34]the pain of another conscious creature is still happening whether or not the cosmos acknowledges it. And that changes things because once you're aware of that, you know, once you can actually imagine what other people's or living creatures experiences feel like from the inside.

[00:26:03]Um, indifference becomes a choice and not a neutral one.

[00:26:14]Now, this makes me think of Russ Cole from True Detective because this is a character about as uh committed a nihilist as pop culture has produced.

[00:26:27]So Cole believes that consciousness is a mistake and he thinks that human identity is a kind of evolutionary misstep.

[00:26:38]So he stares into the void and of course it finds him complete well it's it it finds it's it's completely unimpressed with him. Okay.

[00:26:49]But nonetheless, he still shows up and he still pursues justice and you know he he gives a damn about the suffering of particular people even while maintaining that the universe doesn't.

[00:27:05]The two aren't mutually exclusive because suffering doesn't really need cosmic significance to be real. It just needs to be felt.

[00:27:20]And Cole, for all his nihilism, he clearly felt it. He filled out the paperwork anyway because, you know, whatever the case, the man did possess a moral compass.

[00:27:38]Um, which I think is as good a definition of moral responsibility as anything Sarter wrote. And I would add arguably more concise.

[00:27:55]Um, you know, Victor Frankle survived Awitz and came out of it arguing that meaning could be created even in conditions of absolute horror.

[00:28:12]But now he didn't mean like cosmic meaning though he meant fragile smallcale human meaning which was nonetheless very real to the people living inside it.

[00:28:30]So if the universe doesn't care but we're stuck caring anyway. I think what this means is, you know, we don't get to opt out of that just because the stars aren't paying attention to us.

[00:28:49]But I find this actually to be the more interesting proposition because I don't know. It's I believe it's it's it's more appealing to me than total nihilism and but and it's more appealing than blind faith, too. Um, you know, we're just conscious creatures who are we're making it up as we go.

[00:29:21]And, you know, we're trying to to for the most part, I think, not make things worse for each other in the process. ideally.

[00:29:33]So, I think there's one thing there's one more thing that's worth saying before we get to wherever this is going.

[00:29:44]And that is that we might be wrong about most of it.

[00:29:53]And I mean that in a pretty basic almost embarrassing way that uh human nature or human perception it's limited.

[00:30:07]I mean, we have limited biological sensory equipment that we inherited by the fact that our nervous systems basically evolved for survival in a a specific environment and not it didn't evolve for you know accurately decoding something like the nature of ultimate reality.

[00:30:38]So we perceive three dimensions but current physics suggests that there may be considerably more than that.

[00:30:51]We experience time as linear, right?

[00:30:56]But whether that's actually true, that turns out to be a genuinely complicated question that physicists argue about in ways that would keep most people awake at night or boyed tears suppose I suppose depending.

[00:31:13]In any case, um the point being the the you know the confident atheist and the confident religious fundamentalist, they share something in common that uh neither of them particularly enjoys hearing that they both believe they know what this is.

[00:31:39]And I find that kind of certainty from either side to be a little suspicious because I I think absolute certainty about this stuff tends to it tends to correlate with not really having thought about it long enough in my opinion.

[00:32:03]And I get it. You know, we want answers.

[00:32:08]We want definitive answers one way or the other because we want a framework to live by.

[00:32:17]I think science is it's an extraordinary thing and and it's the best tool that we have for understanding mechanisms, you know, like how things work and and what they're made of and so forth. But it doesn't actually claim to have solved the question of ultimate meaning.

[00:32:39]That's a separate question.

[00:32:42]And I think the people that invoke it to dis dismiss that question entirely, they're doing science a disservice. And and also they're making the conversation, I think, a lot less interesting than it could be.

[00:33:02]So Wernern Heisenberg was one of the architects of um quantic mechanics and he said that the first gulp from the glass of of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist.

[00:33:20]But at the bottom of the glass, maybe God is waiting.

[00:33:28]Now, that that's a striking thing for a quantum physicist to say, right?

[00:33:34]Now, I I don't necessarily agree with that statement, but I respect it. And I'm also willing to admit that I can't be absolutely 100% certain that he's wrong.

[00:33:51]I don't know. I I I'm not sure I'm not sure that anyone's really in a position to be absolutely certain about these larger questions.

[00:34:03]And that's why I think it's really it's the questions and the mystery of uncertainty that is it's more important than the answers.

[00:34:22]Okay, so let's go back to the cosmic joke idea for a minute because I don't think that's just a metaphor. So a big part of the reason why a joke works is because of the gap between the expectation and reality, right?

[00:34:40]So the setup leads you to somewhere and then the punchline lands somewhere else entirely. And I think that right there is actually a pretty accurate description of the human condition because we arrived expecting instructions and a purpose.

[00:35:05]you know, at least some indication that the universe has us in mind when it was putting all this together together.

[00:35:17]And then, well, what happens is there's nothing.

[00:35:26]There's just 93 billion light years of mostly empty space.

[00:35:32]and a species that's smart enough to notice this and and feel personally offended by it.

[00:35:41]Now, that's a pretty good setup, right?

[00:35:43]I mean, the punchline is that we're still we're still here anyway.

[00:35:51]We're still out here making things and caring about each other and hating each other. um you know, still arguing about um I don't know, stupid stuff like parking and uh I guess music preferences and we're falling in and out of love and losing people and trying with varying degrees of success to be decent and all of this against available cosmic evidence.

[00:36:29]And I find something in that. I'm not sure what to call it exactly. It's not comfort, but something, you know, maybe it's the fact that meaning wasn't just handed to us, but we've been making it anyway. you know, like in the places where um I don't know, conscious creatures actually live, like in a conversation or a dinner or a piece of music that hits you in the chest in in such a way that you you can't explain to someone who hasn't felt it.

[00:37:17]And it's not some grandiose eternal kind of meaning. It's just the kind that's available.

[00:37:30]Ellen Watts used to say that the meaning of life is just to be alive.

[00:37:41]that it's so plain and obvious and so simple and yet everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond it.

[00:37:57]And I realize that that that may sound almost offensively offensively uh simple that is until you actually try it.

[00:38:12]You sit somewhere doing nothing and notice just how difficult it is to to just exist without feeling an obligation to do something with it. It's a lot harder than you think because your brain immediately starts behaving like a toddler that's been left alone in a room with a permanent marker.

[00:38:41]and uh Kimu who we talked about earlier.

[00:38:44]So his version of of this was that you have to imagine Cisphus being happy and that the boulder and the hill and and you know all the repetition of it that was that was the whole thing and that somewhere in the acceptance of that something shifted.

[00:39:16]I think what both of them were pointing at just from different directions is that the demand for cosmic significance is the thing that makes ordinary experience feel insufficient.

[00:39:32]Um, an or ordinary experience is for most conscious creatures most of the time all there is.

[00:39:43]You know, it's all most of us get.

[00:39:47]And that's either well, it's either depressing or it's the most um liberating thing that I've said in this monologue, depending on where you're sitting with it, I guess.

[00:40:03]So, you know, the universe, it may very well be indifferent, but nonetheless, we're we're conscious and suffering is real anyway. Uh other people matter anyway. And and we get to or or have to depending on your perspective.

[00:40:26]We have to make something out of this without any outside assistance.

[00:40:36]You know, we're a species that evolved from something that didn't know it existed and somehow became aware of the 13.8 billion years of cosmic history.

[00:40:49]And then we develop the capacity for things like love and music and moral philosophy and also inexplicably reality television and all kinds of other absurdity.

[00:41:04]And yet we're here and we're still trying in all of our um ridiculous glory.

[00:41:17]uh still occasionally getting it right against all the odds, at least for now.

[00:41:26]And you know that that maybe that's the best punch line that the universe could have come up with, probably unintentionally, but if it was intentional, well, I for one appreciate the effort.

[00:41:48]All right, I believe that is all I have for today.

[00:41:53]As always, thanks for listening.