Change your denominator.

Being a human in this day and age got limited. I feel like those kind of questions which were asked once with great reverence, are today barely referenced as conversation starters. People don’t want to go in depth anymore. What scarred me is that the shallowness is not the kind you find at careless teenagers but a deep one, a shallowness rooted in certainty.

We know there is no life after death. No one ever came back, all reports have been debunked a zillion times and currently all culture revolves around a lust of life sentiment feeding a fear of missing out because you only live once.

We know there is no God. Every single attempt to represent God turned out to be a business enterprise. I think right now God has the worst PR problem in history. Not to mention the ubiquity of suffering and injustice which world wide instant communication made known. We’re clearly on an abandoned gem, struggling to survive our peers in a terrible hostile universe.

We know there is no objective truth. Mathematically proven, socially over researched: truth is always relative. Recently we started to learn there are no lies either.

We know right and wrong are political constructs. All ethics eventually got perverted into enforced mass control. History is chock full with reinterpretation and rewriting.

We know there is no soul. Countless MRIs sum up in an impressionist painting of the “soul”, all chemicals and electric currents. No EKG ever picked any other presence than that of a hard working heart.

We know society is as bad as it has always been. There are ten documentaries a week exposing this, amirite. The rulers are as powerful as ever, and their mischief as boring as ever.

So then, what is there to think about? Does a temporary being, a short lived creature holistically aware of itself, despite all its efforts to dull this awareness out, have any business pondering existential or metaphysical questions? Is it fair to ask this of it?

Existence is also known too. The rate of normative behavior is accelerating each decade, revolutionary social spikes are to be found only in dystopia and all non normative behavior tends to be already in the stage of mental illness. Easy is success.

The universe is boring. It only takes mathematical equations to predict what it does. Finding out each equation is not boring, but once found, triviality ensues.

This is probably some effect of advancing tools, or maybe of the increasing density of our civilization, or an effect of our incredibly disturbing loud loneliness. Replacing solitude with noise is a skill.

Yet all this certainty makes us less human. In my opinion the great differentiator which creates the meaning of “human” is our unrelenting running “I don’t know”. The more certainty, the more automation. The more automation, the less attention. The less attention, the less novelty. The less novelty, the shorter the life.

Change your denominator.