At its very best, life makes little sense.
Sure, we can reflect back upon it and stitch together a coherent narrative, filling in the gaps with the best possible explanation. We can even go as far to say there was a purposeful path that it took or there was some kind of justification for everything that happened.
But let’s be honest—are we just lying to ourselves?
The universe doesn’t really care about your plans, luck is a major factor in all things and despite doing everything right, things can still go off the deep end. People don’t make sense on the best of days and their decisions, including ours, are usually baffling to most. Tell ten people they need to make a major lifestyle change or face death within a year and only two will do it.
A good story gives us comfort and if we have to do incredible mental gymnastics to make it work, then so be it. We’ve all seen people make incredible justifications for whatever narrative they believe in and we’ve also witnessed society follow nonsensical ones simply because there they were convinced enough.
There is no point where we’ve figured out life, achieved a perfect society or even really know what we’re doing. For hundreds of thousands of years, we were wandering nomads just trying to survive and figuring out ways to do that together against the elements, and sometimes against each other. Ten thousand years of civilization, where we repeat the same mistakes with different technologies, hasn’t really progressed us any further in our quest to make sense of the universe.
This isn’t a call to just give up and do with what we will, but to embrace the absurdity of our own hubris. To stop glossing over the inconvenient or negative details, or the ones completely out of place, see them for what they are and acknowledge them.
Let’s never stop trying to be better tomorrow than we were today, while also not letting yesterday define what that’s going to be. Sometimes, you just fall into things. Other times, you just get hit with a streak of rotten luck. It’s all simply the absurdity of what it means to live.