Monday, June 9, 2014

The Illusion of Immortality

If history is any indication, we are creatures of habit, doomed forever to repeat our mistakes, and fret over the same meaningless struggles. Time is a steadfast master. It has seen kings become paupers, seen borders be redrawn so many times that the concept of drawing borders means nothing, watched the elements remind man of his maker and yet we don't learn. We worry about things that matter little in the grand scheme of things. What are our worries worth when we try to take in the complexity and the grand majesty of the unknown? After all, it took billions of billions of twists and turns for each one of us to exist. Shouldn't that be enough? Should we not be awed by the fact that each person around us is there because reality played out the way it did?

Our lives are not a trifle. We are beings of greatness limited only by our lack of perspective. As Carl Sagan once said:



 And yet we worry about petty politics, about religion, about peer pressure. Who really cares? Our ancestors must be laughing at us. This is probably why immortality is just an illusion.