It doesn't matter anyway, so be happy

Life on Earth is tiny, fragile, beautiful, and all too brief to spend it miserable, attacking one another and fretting to an early grave over what amounts to nearly nothing. If we are committed to worry anyway, there are more than enough causes more deserving of our energy, ones where we could help others rather than wallowing in existential dread. There is nothing that we can do about our angst. Or, if there is, we should do it as simply as possible and find a way to enjoy our fleeting tenure. While we are fixated inward, ignoring the world around us, there will be no end of people who will need our help. Even if it won't matter in the long term, you will feel satisfaction that you did it and they will feel relief that someone cared.

Look at the sky and realize you don't matter. Witness your newfound freedom. You are free to live your life the best way you know how, because it and you do not otherwise matter. Love people, love yourself. Do not live for another person - including to spite another person - because that provides you no guarantees. You will die and be forgotten in a generation or two. If your life is not improved by an experience and it is avoidable, avoid it. Work on what you can, especially as it contributes to what you consider a good and purposeful life that will make you happy. Do not work to hate yourself and the world. Do not live for your parents or you will find yourself soon adrift. Do not spend your high school or college years tethered to partners who will disappear. Go on that semester abroad. Have experiences that you will treasure for the rest of your life because nothing else matters.

Look at the sky. It does not care about you. Isn't that wonderful? There are probably no gods above and, if there are, they likely wouldn't want you miserable and anxious. If you believe in demons - and why should you? - ascribe to them your every negative thought. Externalize these voices that are not you, that make you hate yourself, want to destroy yourself. Tell those evil little voices that they have never accomplished a solitary thing while you have turned elements forged in the crucible of dying stars into a conscious being who gets to have this singular life. Exorcise them, gods and demons both, and live without their burden. They won't begin to notice your absence, and not merely because you have substance and they, only your misspent thoughts.

Look at the sky and see stars with worlds you will never visit and whose denizens will never contact you. You are irrelevant to the universe and will never plumb more than this mote, if that. You don't have to anticipate your place in the future because you won't be there. Consider the names you know in the past, how many people there ever were, and how much you really know about them. They barely matter, and their mattering is mostly mythology to give yourself impossible exemplars among a vast ocean of people who died unremembered. How many of them wasted their lives in misery, thinking themselves not finite beings but instead insufficient and embarrassed immortals?

Some of them had to be miserable because of the times in which they lived. There is nothing to be done for that. We live in an era - at least in the western world assuming you don't live under a burgeoning dictatorship - that affords people the opportunity of privilege that would have been unfathomable to our anonymous ancestors, yet we are as a people terrified and small. That is a sin, if you choose to believe in sins. That is giving your life over to something that cares about you only as a resource. Forget them. Earn enough money that you are supported, if that is what matters to you, but worry about little beyond that. Working yourself to an early grave for objects you don't need or particularly want is suicide, exchanging hours you could have spent content serving a master to whom you are disposable and replaceable, losing your joy. Take notice of the people who matter to you, those who have improved your existence, and forget the esteem of the rest. If you cannot touch someone, physically or emotionally, why does it matter what they think of you? Spending your free hours glaring at a screen until you hate your life, letting it swallow it up, is fodder for a dystopia.

Look at the stars and consider that these people you think of as important are just as irrelevant. Those you hate are nothing on nothing in nothing. You should not waste your one life on them because they do not matter either, and you should never give them any more power than they are owed, which is not much. They will die just as surely and will likely be forgotten. School children will not be indoctrinated to regurgitate their names by rote, and they don't matter even if that does happen. Being remembered doesn't bring them back or help them any longer. If they lived for their contentment, good for them. If they didn't, why do they matter enough to care about?

Our greatest men and women, those who created something we use to this day, Mozart and Shakespeare and Newton and whomever, don't get to last. We can blast a gold record into space, but it doesn't give them immortality. Trying for that - and I don't think they did as much as create because they could - ruins lives. It shoves us out of the present, which should be where we make our homes. The people who remember them are going to die. Maybe not all at once, but the universe gives no guarantees. A meteor could hit, Yellowstone could blow, the Swine Flu could revive more virulent. Then what is there?

Remember where you are. Recall that you are on a planet, one of an unknowable number. Remember that this is a rock in an indifferent vacuum and no one ultimately will care that you once lived and will die. None of this matters. It can't. Even if you became the god king of Earth, it is a speck of dust.

Spoiler: we don't survive. We were an accident of chance and evolution and the world ends. You cannot do anything to stop entropy, the eventual heat death of the universe. There is nowhere for our species to go, even if we could last that long (and we are eager to hasten our extinction).

The speeding ticket you just got, your boss being a tinpot despot, your aching breakup, is ultimately irrelevant. It may hurt you now, but it won't even cause a ripple. Don't give it the power because you are allotted only so much. You haven't any to waste.

Your worry is misplaced. It is chemicals in your brain and operant conditioning gone wrong. That doesn't make it go away, but it underscores just how little it should matter. Remind yourself that it is the malfunctioning of a biological machine you can only reprogram from the inside and get to doing it before the patterns become any more entrenched.

You should enjoy your life. Have the extra slice of cake, watch that extra episode on Netflix if it I going to make you happy. Go for a walk in the woods, listening to the music that makes you glad you exist in this breath. Live your life as long and best you can, even if "best" shortens the length (why would you want to live five years in agony before your death?).

Find the life that helps you fully live while you are here and throw the rest as far from you as you can manage. It won't matter either way, so you might as well try to be happy.

Soon in Xenology: Amber's birthday. Lake George.

last watched: Archer
reading: Vellum
listening: The Fray