I want you to imagine the pyramids as they were when they were new. The finely chiselled stone, gleaming gold caps on the top, a majestic view. And now I’d like you to imagine them as they are now, worn and tattered. Piles of rubble sitting in the desert sand. And now I’d like you to imagine them another 4000 years from now, and now 40000 and now 4 million and now 40 million. The great towers of stone crumble in to dust and are mixed in with the desert sands. And now I’d like you to imagine your house and your clothes, everything you own, over that same time span. The moths eating your clothes in the lofts of your grandchildren as they are passed down until they are finally binned, left to rot somewhere.
Now imagine anything you think might be constant in your life over the millions of years that our planet will see. Over that time periods mountain ranges will turn in to grassy plains and new mountains will rise up in their place. Our world will be an entirely different place. All the money, computers, history preps, turned to dust against the challenge of time.
Now I’d like you to think about the average life span of a species, even the most successful ones have a life span of around 13 million years. We will give us the benefit of the doubt and say we have 40 million years. So 40 million years from now there will be no humans. Many of you will have children and they will have children and so on and so on. Lines of ancestry down to the final humans and then finally then they too will die and the human race will cease to exist. It’s going to happen. Your ancestral granddaughter starving, being eaten by giant kittens, drowning in a lake of fire, you don’t know, but someday humans will cease to be, and then what will be the point of all those children, all those years of survival ending in nothing.
That is assuming nothing of the billions of things that could kill us before then happen. Sea level rise, solar storms, meteors, wars.So in the end that means that anything you do, all the medals of honour, the millions of dollars, the multinational corporations the kids in the backyard will all amount to nothing. Anything you leave behind will someday cease to be. It makes you question what really is worthwhile doing in life.
In the end I believe the only thing worth doing in life is enjoying it. Emotions are the only things that cannot be collected, quantified. Albeit when you are gone your memories will go with you, all the nights out and nights in. But what is the point of the life of stress for something that is, in the end, going to rot with time. That is what I want to leave you with. My meaning of life. Enjoy it above all else because in the end, nothing else matters apart from your happiness. You only live once.
