Better Short is an experiment in less than 500-word expressions of ideas or stories within Could Be Worse.
Good morning GIFs, recycled jokes, political rants (which make you wince), forwarded stories of dubious origin, and a constant stream of birthday and anniversary wishes for people. The family WhatsApp group is a unique place.
You try to keep up, but there is only so much one mortal can do.
Life happens, and Humpty-dumpty1, you’ve missed a couple of birthdays, an anniversary and maybe even a condolence or two.
It’s nothing personal, you think. But resentment festers like a three-week-old chutney forgotten at the back of your mom’s fridge. Relationships change colour and begin to taste a bit sour.
Why? Because people assumed intent. Surely, you ignored those wishes on purpose? You made a choice not to wish. At least, that’s the takeaway.
Laughably juvenile, yes, but name any war today, and it probably has an equally juvenile beginning.
Most things in the world have nothing to do with us. And yet, time and again, we always assume things are being done to us.
As if villains plot to foil our hero’s journey. However, in the immortal words of the great modern poet and composer, Aniruddh Ravichandar (/s):
Orey kelvidhaan, Villan yaaruda?
(weak translation: the only question is, who is the villain?)
Human wisdom is a process of unspecialing
A long time ago, someone outfoxed a Woolly Mammoth and thought, “Wow, I’m quite the hairy genius here. I must be special.”
It’s natural that, so filled with our sense of specialness, we thought the stars were shining for us. We still believe that the cosmic orbit of the planets influences our measly lives. We had no choice but to invent God - no way we were accidental blips.
But all of human evolution has been one long arc of learning that we aren’t that special:
No, we weren’t created by an intelligent designer.
No, we aren’t radically separate from other animals.
No, Earth isn’t the centre of the solar system.
No, we aren’t the only life in the universe (probably).
Each step has been a blow to our sense of specialness.
Yes, Life is extraordinary. And yes, an intelligent life, even more so, but it’s just running the numbers. Intelligent life on Earth is a spark in a brief period when things aligned in one out of a gazillion attempts - a planet in the right orbit, a star in its correct phase, an atmosphere, water seeded by a meteor, etc.
Extrapolating humanity’s specialness is survivorship bias on a cosmic scale.
Over millennia, even Earth will change.
Earth will spend most of its life as a barren planet devoid of life than it does with life. In the book of Earth, all life would get a page at best (most likely a sentence).
You’re probably not that special.
It often helps to think of ourselves as the hero in our stories.
But whenever we have a choice to view the world, it’s probably better to view it as a massive domino falling since the Big Bang. The path isn’t predetermined, but one always falls due to a hundred, a million or a gazillion dominos falling before it. Those dominos didn’t conspire to make this one fall, but it just happens.
We’re yet another variable that seeds unpredictability in a vast system of dominos. Our actions cause tiny, infinitesimally small changes in the universe's arc, but the avalanche of dominoes that were pushed a long, long time before is massive.
This perspective is helpful because it helps us avoid the view that people are out to get us, that everyone cheers our downfall, or that our colleagues are sitting and plotting ways to lower our status in the company.
Frankly, my dear, no one gives a damn (about you).
Could be Worse,
Tyag
P.S. This isn’t intended to sound nihilistic. There is something special about the fact that we can contemplate all this.
“Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.”
―Alan Wilson Watts
I am trying to use this instead of oft-used phrases like lo and behold or before you know it.
…bring back the wooly mammoth…
I would like to give you one of my favourite quotes on the meaning of life from the philosopher, Isaiah Berlin: "As for the meaning of life, I do not believe that it has any: I do not at all ask what it is, for I suspect it has none, and this is a source of great comfort to me — we make of it what we can, and that is all there is about it. Those who seek for some deep, cosmic, all-embracing, teleologically arguable libretto or god are, believe me pathetically deluded.