An essay compiled from the 52Weeks series written December 4, 2021 to December 25, 2021.

Part I

Like every other child of the 70’s, I grew up using books to learn. Instead of the Internet, I remember enormous sets of encyclopedias people used for reference at the library. Hell, I even flipped through hundreds of their pages the few times that I actually used them there. It was a mystery to me how all that information could be packed into so few books, but they were printed with really small text so I guess that helped; computers would have probably blown my kid mind.

I idolized my uncle Larry, and he was into astronomy so that was always my go-to subject. I wrote a couple middle school papers on “the planets” so it’s no surprise that Britannica’s pictures of them probably generated my first interest in cosmology. If the Internet was around back then, I wonder how that interest would have been influenced by its easy feedback on a query. At least with an encyclopedia I had to put out (substantial) energy flipping through pages and manually sifting through text to find the information I wanted; it was quite a time investment.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

I carried a substantial interest of astronomy into adulthood, and eventually it lead me to other related fields, among them chaos and string theories, Einstein’s several theories of relativity, and other related topics in cosmology and general physics. I’ve read many books on these topics, and was for years proud of myself for keeping up the interest hatched nearly 20 years before.

But I noticed a side-effect. Where before simple curiosity drove my book purchases and the interest that put my nose in their pages, I began feeling a sense of dread about trivial things like our sun exploding or the collision of galaxies or radiation from the center of the giant black hole we believe exists in the middle of the Milky Way.

I began searching my selected reading for explanations that might oppose what seemed like the eventual certain extinction of our planet. I began to realize I was reading to quell my fear of a future demise so far advanced that it did not involve me or any human: not only did I dread my own death, but I worried about the billion-year future when our sun becomes a red giant and definitely snuffs out all life remaining on earth. Or an asteroid impact that would kill everyone, I mean take your pick.

Who knows, maybe it was the Internet — with its instant presentation of all knowledge — that accelerated me to the peak of my emotional frenzy, when I first contemplated the finality of life and spent the weekend crying in the bath tub. But honestly, that crisis was a long time in the making. The only reason I was honest with myself at that moment in my life was aparantly that I gave up using interest in science as a crutch, and no longer delayed a truer and more valuable — albeit more painful — thought process.

The complete extinguishing of my interest in scientific materials took another 10 years. I don’t believe it is any coincidence that I’ve had the most meaningful experiences of my life after I gave up the pursuit of knowledge in those fields. Today I have a completely different outlook on not only the relevance to me of what we generally refer to as “knowledge”, but about the information itself — and I wonder, if others around me were aware of my present perspective, how might it change our relationships.

Part II

It was really the third law of thermodynamics that got to me, but arrival at that point took a while.

All the old and distorted memories of my childhood paint a pretty naive picture of youthful exuberance and interest in trivial yet complicated scientific topics. Ego played a part: I enjoyed having good grades that were better than my friends’. So obviously it was no coincidence that my interest naturally moved into esoteric topics few knew anything about — it’s easier to seem intelligent when no one can disprove your understanding. And who knows, maybe ego explains why I decided to be a chemical engineer when I was in fourth grade. Memory says it was the salary, but that was over forty years ago so the details are fuzzy.

When I got to college I took thermodynamics like any other junior in Chem E. Our class first reviewed the three basic laws of thermodynamics, but it probably took 20 years for it to really sink in. I mean no one uses that information in the real world anyway, right?

If you care to know more about the third law, Wikipedia has a nice write-up — but, if you’re lazy like me, it says, in a nutshell, that an enclosed system always moves toward greater disarray, e.g. entropy always increases. Now you might be thinking, “what the fuck does that mean?” and I wouldn’t blame you, so here’s an imaginary example to demonstrate:

Let’s say we have an empty box. It is empty of everything, even air — not even gas molecules exist within it — except there is a small magical container inside, and it is filled with oxygen. The oxygen in the magic container within cannot escape or move as long as the little container exists, and the oxygen molecules within this imaginary container are all somehow aligned. It doesn’t matter how they are arranged, only that there is some kind of order. The third law of thermodynamics says that if this magic container holding the gas somehow disappears, the gas molecules will move toward disorder, even without interaction from forces within the empty outer box; it says that rearrangement of the molecules into chaos is a natural phenomenon of their existence.

Now you might think, “who cares?”

Well, consider this: what is life? Generally speaking it is considered the orderly arrangement of matter into something that performs a function. Its key aspect is the “orderly arrangement” part, and paired with thermodynamics, this was a huge problem for me. Why?

If you drew an imaginary box around the entire universe, the third law of thermodynamics says that for every living (e.g. ordered) thing within it, some other aspect of the universe must experience disorder of at least the same magnitude. It means that eventually the universe will work itself into a situation where it is impossible for life to exist because, according to the law, everything moves toward greater and greater disarray. So, sooner or later the universe will at every point be too cold or too spread out for matter to interact and “organize” itself into life — and by then, supposedly everything will have been dead for a long time.

Physics and science in general seemed infallible, so I was willing to reach conclusions and stress out about a future that has nothing to do with me: our science says everything must die.

Depressed yet? I was when I read about things like this. Back then concerns about relatively trivial things like this were huge contributors to the depression I experienced before I woke up. But enventually I realized there’s more to life than scientific endeavors and other human assumptions and I started thinking enough to reach my own conclusions, like there is no such thing as depression and that science is not definitive.

Part III

Death cannot explain itself. The earnestness consists precisely in this, that the observer must explain it to himself.

The only unique aspect of my personality and its changes is that it is mine; everyone is similar, only your context differs. Yet despite our common traits, there is meaning to be found in the fine points, which are really only valuable if we consider them.

In my case, life’s evolution has left me with what I believe in the West is a set of uncommon perspectives. The longer I am alive, the less I care for generally accepted conventions of science, psychology, and social etiquette: what we say or believe we “know” really has no impact on me or anyone else. In the end, we describe our reality — be it in the physical, emotional, or purely theoretical realm — only within our own limited constructions. And we are fooling ourselves if we believe our observations are comprehensive.

After nearly fifty years, I’m finally comfortable with my admittedly very narrow perspective. My ignorance is elective: I don’t care to know anything or be anyone. My only ambition is to my family, but given my goals include diluting my own personality to a more observational level, even that has a limit.

I’ll be the first to admit upon your deeper observation of these words that my own philosophy is flawed and often contradictory. I don’t really care. I’ve recently proven to myself that life is more about its refinement than the pursuit of an absolute truth anyway, so what difference does it really make if I’m right or wrong about anything.

Yet, as long as I’m here, I have to live among you other human beings, and more often than not, we disagree about a lot. It is only because of the luxury of our coincidental birth in this place and time that I don’t have to worry about my dissent from convention — but I do often think about how to maintain relationships when I see so little evidence that others are willing to detach from the outside world and truly think for themselves.

I’m grateful at least that I am so goddamn lucky to be aware enough to ponder out-loud. But then again, I’m not sure I believe in luck, either, so…

Part IV

Unclose your mind. You are not a prisoner. You are a bird in flight, searching the skies for dreams.

Barren. Cold. Lifeless. Bleak. Unwelcoming. My thoughts during our family run on the Homer Spit were simultaneously familiar and foreign.

In the past, feeling the crunch of my footsteps thudding upon the ice sheet punctured many times before me by pedestrians and moose might have influenced the pain in my freezing fingertips. Not today, because I’m a different person trying not to wallow.

Is it really possible for any sentient being to relate to its environment in any way detatched from its own perceptions? Today I think not, which explains my fleeting contempt at crossing the slick, snowy street near our parked car only to run six miles in the cold rain.

Memory is the only thing I have to understand my surroundings — therefore, if I forget myself, the world is new and pain has a different meaning.