Every day, I get up after around six hours of sleep, brushing away the trailing remnants of a fantastic dreamworld and forcing my eyes open. I water my plants, eat breakfast, and make some coffee. I pack up my gear and move outside. I walk uphill to a tall tower. I wait for lifts, unlock doors, and move things around. I read a little, write a little, and take a break to eat. I pack up my gear. I wait for the lift. I walk downhill. I unlock more doors. I close my eyes.
In the midst of the even mind-numbing routine, or perhaps especially in middle of repetitive, stereotyped actions, a stray thought can’t help being created in our minds. It’s a small nagging voice, often drowned in the noise of traffic and everyday existence, that occasionally breaks the waves, saying, “Why do we do what we do?” Why do we do anything of what we do? Why do we wake up every day, why do we go to work, why do we walk uphill, and why do we pretty much the same thing we do every single day?
Some of us console ourselves by pretending that all our actions make sense in some grand destiny: actions that appear to the undiscerning eye as mindless routine come together and make sense on some larger scale. Individualists work in stereotyped ways to achieve some grand design over long time scales. Collective workers work in unison to build something evident on the scale of several human lives, but invisible in individual life.
Some of us don’t really think of this, and do what we do because it’s the path of least resistance from one dreamless sleep to the next. For some of us, the struggle from one day to the next is so difficult that if we stopped to think, we wouldn’t make it. Also, it’s not like we don’t know why we do what we do: it’s for survival, plain and simple.
What we experience as the continuity of conscious existence is a unstable, transient existence for a loosely bound collection of things that will quickly disintegrate and indiscriminately diffuse away. However, in the temporary state between birth and death, we have to think about what we do, because it is important: not important in a grand sense, because nothing actually is, but important in a personal sense, because this is the only thing we can find important, and only we can find this thing important: no one else cares.
If you haven’t thought about precisely why you’re sitting right here, doing what you’re doing now, you’re probably wasting your time.
Our sense of self is mental shorthand for a collection of ideas and memories and emotions that will die when our bodies die unless we spread them to other, younger bodies. A great idea lives on forever for two reasons: firstly, because of the people it affects and changes, and secondly, because the idea itself is copied, modified, improved and passed on.
The only thing you can do that is personally important and globally meaningful is to do something; to grow and distribute a new idea, to change people’s lives for the better because the change is the ultimate goal; to change our collective understanding of the world and of ourselves because that’s how we want the world to be.
People who are perceived as “doing something”, i.e., achieving some sort of meaningful, perhaps positive change, expend their efforts at different scales. A quiet, young woman wishes to work in orphanages, serving as a role model for individual children. The number of children whose lives she can change is limited; her interaction with them will be intensive. This is an example of a wish to do “microscopic” good. It is almost certain that her work will not really change the statistics of social dynamics and the global incidents of the evil she wishes to fight, but the effects of her efforts, measured on her time scale, on her spatial scale, are real, large, and tangible.
On the other extreme, a dreamy idealist wished to change large numbers of people. He writes books expressing his ideas, not knowing who would read them. He does things so that his actions can be seen, and could affect the behaviour of millions. All personal wishes become subordinate to his desire to change as many lives as possible. Many people know him and admire him, but his life is lonely and peerless. His is an example of a wish to do “macroscopic” good. His actions do change society on large, statistical scales, and endure for time scales that shall exceed his own.
Whatever the scale of one’s life and of one’s actions, the only measure of all things is how it affects others. Every single thing you do that involves only yourself, every thing you do that benefits no one, that is seen by no one, that in no meaningful way affects the life of any one else, is something that will die with you, something that will affect the course of humanity in no way whatsoever. It is, in this grand sense, completely meaningless.
But every action you do that makes other people’s lives better, even incrementally, will be remembered for all eternity; if not in the written history of men, then in the ineffable cultural consciousness we all share.
That is your choice, now, and that is your answer to everything.
