Does It Matter?
I’m typing these words on an Apple laptop as I listen to George Winston play piano in my headphones. There is nothing strange or extraordinary about this. But pull back and consider:
The Milky Way is one of 2 trillion galaxies in the cosmos. This is too absurdly large to grasp, so we don’t even try. But try. These 2 trillion galaxies each contain upwards of 100 billion stars. Around one of them, circles a pale blue dot. Out of nothing but the earth itself, the inhabitants of the dot created pianos and learned to play them. They built studios, microphones, headphones, microprocessors, and the internet. The very thoughts I am attempting to write are not original, but have been passed down, added to, and refined through the ages.
This is beyond strange. I am annoyed when the light turns red, but it doesn’t cross my mind how I’m driving a car on a road, and we all agreed to obey stop lights after we figured out how to make them, and at any moment the entire population could get taken out by a meteorite, but somehow doesn’t. The things that concern me are not only infinitesimal, they are precariously stacked on improbable layers of historical progress. Do these things that concern me matter in the cosmic sense?
We agreed on money as an expedient form of exchange, in order to advance civilization. Now, rich people live nine years longer than poor people. This isn’t an intellectual exercise; these are real lives. I saw someone in a $200,000 Maserati pass a homeless man who might not see the end of the day, and we’re all somehow okay with this. We don’t notice it anymore than our place in the Milky Way, because it’s just part of the ethos. One person lives in misery and hard labor and dies nine years before someone else who lives in decadence. But they’re both just inhabitants of the pale blue dot, one no better or more valuable than the other. How can I operate within the sphere of my petty concerns when millions of people die from preventable diseases and lack of resources? It seems improbable that God cares about the things that concern me when there are so many others with far greater concern.
Inequality of resources is not the only injustice. Someone is born with a genetic disorder and someone else is born healthy and beautiful. Their life experiences will be drastically different through no choice of their own. If a man is disfigured and confined to a wheelchair, the world will present itself to him as a cold and hostile place with a small ceiling to what he will be allowed to achieve. There are beautiful adolescents on social media who already experience the world as a generous place full of financial and sexual opportunity. Most of us fall somewhere in the middle. But how do we find meaning in our lives when others have to live with so much less or are offered so much more?
Random accidents could happen to anyone at any moment and completely alter the rest of their lives. It’s hard to imagine why I’m still alive when I know friends younger than me who have died. Michael J. Fox was diagnosed with Parkinson’s at the start of a promising career, and a captain of the LSU Tigers, with the world ready to be served up to him on a plate, was diagnosed with brain cancer. Any of us could get dropped at any moment. How do we carry on under the weight of this suspense?
Even if we go through life without major incident, time has us by the throat. Time limits us as we get older, and does so at an increasing rate. It narrows the horizons of possibility, and there’s nothing we can do about it. We are trapped like insects in amber to the inescapable forward march of time. How do we make the most of the moment, when the moment is always slipping by?
The vastness of what is beyond our control boggles the mind. It is too overwhelming and paralyzing to consider. It’s easier to imagine we have no control at all and are just deterministic bits of dust in the wind. But we make choices that radically affect our lives. Tom Cruise wouldn’t be where he is today if he didn’t decide to pursue acting. But how many people made the same decision, put in the same discipline and sacrifice, and didn’t make it? Our choices influence our lives, but they do not determine them. How much influence these choices have compared to forces beyond our control, I do not know.
All of these thoughts and questions swirl around the theme of meaning. Meaning is where we turn to defend ourselves against the terror of the Abyss. We try ignoring the Abyss or distracting ourselves with stimulus and self-medication. But these are short-term and ineffective solutions. We need meaning. Almost any pain or suffering is tolerable if we know the higher purpose it serves. Given all we are up against, we will need all the meaning we can find. But these days, it’s hard to find. We used to accept without question what we received from the gods. Now, we’ve killed god and it seems there’s nothing left to do but postulate multiverse theories that only compound the meaninglessness of our situation.
Is there meaning enough to save us from an incomprehensibly vast world of inequality, injustice, hostility, randomness, chaos, and mortality?
Dr. Jordan Peterson points out that those who live as if life is meaningful tend to do significantly better than those who live as if it isn’t. Whether or not one’s life is better or worse may not matter in the cosmic sense, but it certainly matters to us. Existentialism suggests this is enough. We generate a sense of purpose as we pursue what we find personally meaningful within the confines of our opportunities and limitations.
It’s a thought. But I wonder how far it goes. What if life really does matter? Not just human life in the broad sense, but the individual, personal actions that make up the whole? What if the most important thing in the cosmos is that I type these words on this computer and you wash the dishes or sweep the floors after reading them? No matter what condition we were born into or what hand fate has dealt us, what if it really matters how we play the game? I think it might.
The Bible suggests things as insignificant as eating, drinking, and giving a glass of water to a child carry eternal significance.* I can’t possibly see how this would be the case. But this may be the most extraordinary and surprising thing yet. To go through one’s whole life stumbling incompetently in the dark, doing one’s miserable best and not seeing how it could possibly stack up to a hill of beans in this crazy world, and then to die only to see what God Himself was doing the whole time, orchestrating a symphony in which every note finds its place. To see what He was doing in and through each one of us the entire time. To see how those small choices we made when no one was watching had ripples that carried all the way to Heaven itself. I can’t see it now, but if I did, it wouldn’t be faith.
We are always building philosophies and theologies into a Tower of Babel reaching to Heaven in order to avoid the harder work of belief. It is hard work. We see the pain and futility that exists on Earth, but we don’t see Heaven. We see individual stories bent by the seemingly arbitrary and capricious whims of a cruel world. But we don’t see how they blend together to tell a bigger story. It’s hard to believe, and some days I don’t. But right now, I type these words on this laptop and listen to George Winston play piano, and in spite of everything, I believe it matters.
J.
*1 Corinthians 10:31, Matthew 10:42
Jan. 16, 2024