The Mayors of Whoville

It should be so easy. It should be so easy to say "don't worry about it... you'll be dead in 50 years." You'll be dead in 50 years, and your bones will turn to dust. Eventually everyone you know will be dead, and their bones will turn to dust too. On long enough of a timeline, everyone who was aware of your existence in their lifetime will turn to dust, and as far as mankind is concerned, it will eventually be as if you never existed, even if you were the Mayor of Whoville.

Then the sun will die, and the earth will turn to dust, and your atoms will be recyled and eventually become a part of some other living creature who feels important and unique.

In the very long run, you won't matter to mankind. Or perhaps more to the point, mankind won't matter in the cosmos, the big picture. Your every action has an impact and we all shape each other and the earth and the universe, and vice versa, every moment. But it only matters in the cosmos - it doesn't matter to the cosmos.

You're the last thing on the universe's mind - so small you don't even register. Smaller than Horton's speck of dust. The cosmos doesn't love you, but it will give you everything, and you will live and love and learn and feel things indescribably powerful. Then, though the cosmos doesn't hate you, it will destroy you.

Knowing this, and as much as I truly believe it, why is it impossible to live like it? Why does anything still hurt, knowing that each frustration, transgression, embarrassment and disappointment will be wiped from our individual and collective memory?

Why is the good still so satisfying, and the bad still so painful, knowing that down the line I, and other people, and the kindly elephant with the big ears, won't even know the difference?

I often say that the meaning of life is simply to find the meaning in life, i.e., to find satisfaction and drive despite being born into an environment lacking any inherent purpose or value.

I have also always felt that truly being able to act within a universal perspective on one's own little life, to take to heart one's incredibly diminutive role in the grand scheme of things and really walk the walk, would be quite the achievement (as far as human achievements go, anyway).

The latter of those two goals seems harder because it's an exotic pursuit which results in more of a conscious struggle, but the former only seems unheroic because it looks prosaic from the outside. It's a monumental struggle to which we're naturally acclimated.

I have tried to entertain both outlooks simultaneously, but the moment I really get a hold on the truth of our place in universal time and spatial scales, something human snags me and I lose my grip. The two are not entirely incompatible, but any success in the cerebral pursuit of cosmic perspective seems to undermine the visceral ebb and flow of meaning that we're naturally programmed to turn to for satisfaction.

I want to be able to draw an insightful conclusion about why it's nearly impossible to abandon the emotional and material trappings of our tendency to inflate our existence's importance, and why we still suffer so much despite the impermanence of our pain.

But I should probably take a step in the right direction and sleep well on the reassurance that, if I never manage to articulate it, it won't be long before nobody knows the difference.