I refresh my Facebook feed and ‘Nihilist Memes’ is the first thing to pop up. There’s an image of a father and his toddler aged son saying “i wish i was a butterfly.” “because it can fly?” asks the father. “because it dies in 24 hours.” The meme has almost 40k likes at the time of this posting.

As the internet transforms the way we communicate and relate, older folk often miss out on some of the subtleties lying beneath the surface of our Instagram feeds and meme pages. We are a generation born into frustration as the world is simultaneously at our fingertips to observe, but light-years away from impacting. We learn about billions of new planets being discovered on a regular basis, but this universal perspective keeps our own personal futility at the forefront of our minds.

We absord irony like it’s going out of style because our very existence is the epitome of a fucking paradox. The universe seems to be writing a satire about consciousness, poking fun at our hero’s journey by seducing us with imaginations that never end and a laughably small human lifespan to explore our dreams.

We are told to make our lives meaningful and then forced into a capitalist economic system that demands nearly all of our free time to be spent ‘earning’ food and housing through meaningless work. We have begun to tear down the facades of religious securities and we see the scared little men high in their towers, still attempting to pull our marionette strings to buy into their disguise.

There are only so many ways to cope at this point in human discovery, and I applaud our generation’s wry handling of the situation. We’ve used the constantly churning machine of internet content to distract and entertain. We make jokes about anyone who gets too serious, because we realize that absurdity must be taken with a dose of levity. We only speak in sarcasm and we give into our warped senses of humor. We take your Dada movement of the early 20^th century and raise you Donald fucking Trump as our president and all of the gloriously hilarious jokes to come from it. Nothing is too sacred to troll anymore, and perhaps that’s a good thing.

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There are universal themes of expanding and contracting across every facet of human existence. Even the very essence of our human form can be condensed into the simple act of breathing. Prana, the universal life force, the energy that accompanies breath is one that we cannot exist for mere minutes without. As our lungs expand, we absorb the vitality in the air around us, we fill until we are comfortable, until we can sit with the moment in front of us without restlessness. And as we empty, we release the stale memories of the moment that has now passed and cleanse ourselves as we prepare for the next.

There is a word in tantric philosophy, “spanda” which touches on a very specific energy that we can tap into if we open ourselves up. The definition may take a few reads to fully absorb:

Spanda: The original, primordial subtle vibration that arises from the dynamic interplay of the passive and the creative polarizations of the Absolute, and that by unfolding itself into the energetic process of differentiation bringing forth the whole of creation.

If anything, it can sometimes be too easy to dissolve into this interplay. I don’t believe that we are divine beings, or that when we die, there will be a God or a god that looks just like us waiting at Heaven’s gates to welcome us into eternity. I don’t believe in fate or angels or ghosts or most anything that has only been passed down through stories. But to deny this energy, spanda, almost seems silly. When you look past the jargon and mysticism, spanda is what turns ideas and imagination into reality. It is the energy that wove itself into our dna when we became the species that could not only look at the moon, but create machines to take us there.

It can be easy to allow nihilism to dispel our appreciation for the wondrous universe around us. Once we think “this is it,” ‘it’ can feel full of disappointments. But regardless of if a god put this all in motion, we are individual creatures that can change the world around us, that alone should feel like pure magic. For better or worse, we have risen from the primordial soup that we once evolved from and we have built a world to match our favor. We wake every morning with the opportunity to put spanda into action in our personal lives. We can allow feelings of meaninglessness to sink us down until our feet are stuck in the mud, unable to enjoy the life force that is running currents through our veins, or we can let it energize us. We are conscious beings, whether we like it or not. We are gods without the immortality. And that divine energy, that enveloping strength and power, that expansion and contraction, the cosmic heaving that has lifted us to this point, it sure would be a shame to waste.

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What is a human life worth? It sounds like a question meant for philosophers and those late night deep talks with your friends when you’re all edible high and you’ve gotten past the shallow stuff. Instead, it’s a question that permeates all of our decisions, on both a personal and societal level.

Most of the problems that are growing at alarming rates and actually threatening the well being of the planet and our species began as an empathy problem. Environmentally, we have scientists describing in irrefutable detail how we are doing permanent damage to the Earth that will kill generations of poor people, yet we are at a complete standstill. We have decided that anyone not lucky enough to be born in a first world country has a value, a worth, and that value combined is not enough to change our consumerist patterns. We allow men with profit driven goals to wage wars that are fought with the blood of young men and women who thought they were defending a country that cared about that, and we drop bombs seemingly without even taking a peak at who might be a casualty that day.

Watching the healthcare debates recently feels like being inside a twilight zone. It is astounding that even with constituents watching, politicians can make arguments about cost saving and entitlements to persuade the audience to believe that only certain people with certain incomes deserve health. We can look at our neighbors and family members and deem them unworthy of doing anything more than fighting for survival.

Capitalism has forced us to look at the world through a lens of self-serving value. Because everything in front of us has been given a cost, we are constantly determining if the cost of the thing in front of us is worth the value that it gives us. While this may work for shoes and restaurants, it gets a lot trickier when the thing is front of us is our mother, our coworker, our friend or a nameless and faceless foreigner with no cultural ties to us whatsoever. And once that lens is nice and snug, it’s a lot trickier to set it to the side than we might think. We never put an actual price tag on top of grandma’s head, so we forget that we’re still determining if her inherent value to us is worth the time we sacrifice when we return one of her calls. It’s not a coincidence that the family unit is dissolving, after all. Family is much less valuable to us in 2017 than it has ever been before.

Are we proud of who we are? Are we okay with how we treat people? We pay taxes that are used to put spikes on alleyways where homeless people sleep at night instead of deeming every human being worthy of a safe place to sleep and using the greatest wealth the world has ever seen to provide it to them.

We were spoon fed a story about a system that says I cannot get mine, unless you do not have yours. We are submerged into the ideals of a starvation economy. There is not enough to go around, so you must take what you can, while you can. We can only pretend that we still have humanity for so long. And every time that we let someone convince us that this world doesn’t have enough for all of us to thrive, we let it come that much closer to death.

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When I started this website, it was difficult to decide what perspective I wanted to write from. I knew I wanted to write as a creative outlet and I knew I wanted to force myself to continue exploring conscious concepts as a part of my own journey. But who did I want to write as? Did I want to be an impersonal thought process – a voice nestled in concepts that appeared out of nowhere and only used logic and reason to come to new conclusions? Or did I want to be me, the actual human being writing these words, the person who has to lay down at night and live with the voice inside my own head.

I couldn’t talk about existential dread without being the latter. Existential dread has run my life far before I even knew what I was experiencing. Growing up in a conservative Christian home, I grew up telling myself that I would be a missionary. My devotion to God was passionate, mature and seemingly never ending. Yet even with unwavering faith, I had a fear that poisoned my heart. Most nights, as young as age 7, after I thanked the Lord for everything I had and asked him to help my friends and family, I had only one thing I begged for: please, Lord, don’t send me to Hell. I would let hot tears run down my face as I begged for his mercy and grace. Here I was, living in so many ways the best life I knew how from my little understanding of the world, and the thought of eternal punishment began to take over my life. Some nights I would just stare at the ceiling and let the thoughts of Hell absorb my being until I got nauseated.

I could never fathom any concept being more truly terrifying to my soul than Hell. What could ever be worse? I remember talking to a friend years later and telling her how simple it must be to think about death as an atheist. An eternal rest? Psh, easy peasy.

Then I grew up, I began to question what gave this one book put together by other mere humans divine meaning. The things my church told me and the things I observed no longer matched. Before I knew it, my faith was gone. I tried to grasp onto it, but it slipped through my fingers faster than I knew how to handle. The pain was agonizing. The biggest change this made was the only truly permanent one – death. Death had an entirely new meaning. And the moment I realized that ‘nothingness’ would be my eventual ending, it took over.

At first I didn’t realize what was happening. Thoughts of death seeped into my days even when I was happy, with friends, at the movie theater, driving, sober, drunk, it didn’t matter. I could be in the middle of a stimulating conversation and I would recognize the pit at the bottom of my stomach, “You will stop existing. Everything that you’ve known, everything that comes after you, it will be gone.”

Once it became clear that these intrusive thoughts were here to stay, I first tried to battle them head on. I bought books, I wrote my thoughts down, I tried to talk with friends, I tried to out reason my fear by recognizing how absurd it is to obsess over the one thing that in no way, shape or form I can stop. But that was the part of it all that always drew me back in. I could do nothing. I was utterly and completely helpless. It doesn’t matter what I create, who I connect with, what I discover, I will end. I am only an observer of a cold universe that has no interest in keeping me around.

To Be Continued

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As we move into an age where science and open communication across cultures has made the belief in an afterlife impossible for many of us, we’re met with a very intense reality: this tiny lifetime, this blink of an eye in a cosmic sense, is probably all that we have. The thought alone is enough to send you into a spiral of despair, and it’s one we really haven’t found an answer to. How can you accept that? Our identities, our egos, our minds, our existences, it is all that we have. And it seems that the more we accept that death is a permanent end as an undeniable fact, the more we do all we can to push that thought out of our minds.

But the faster we run from our existential dread, the more we devalue time. Time, the thing we just identified as our most limited and precious resource, is the thing we deny ourselves of the most. The obsession with busyness is seen all around us: it’s commonplace to brag about how little we’ve slept or to lament about our never-ending commitments. When we finally reach the weekend, we fill it with errands and so many hours of television that the daylight slips away and we find ourselves furious to discover that Monday morning is creeping back already. Yet, we can’t stop.

If we stop, we think. If we stop, those thoughts of immortality and human limitations and disappointments begin to creep in.

This is why so many of us have our scariest moments while we’re lying awake in our beds, waiting for the escape of sleep. It’s one of the few times we are actually still. We find it so easy to spend each day numbing our minds with meaningless work and each evening essentially turning our brains off while we absorb television shows meant solely for distraction. And every moment in between is spent scrolling through our smart phones on autopilot, scrolling past updates from friends we don’t really know, scanning made up lives of celebrities that haven’t really accomplished anything besides a few million online followers. Meanwhile, all of life’s truly special features are at our fingertips, but by their nature they require our mind’s presence. Spending quality time with friends and family, enjoying the utterly magnificent power and beauty of nature, embracing quietness and solitude, these are all things that contain true power and potential for growth and expanding your mindset, but presence is scary. It can be terrifying to embrace the reality around us. If we began to value time the way it deserves, if we began to see each day as a precious gift and to use each one with the respect that it deserves, then we have to come to terms with how little time we really have. We would have to truly embrace the reality that tomorrow is never guaranteed, and that each moment should be regarded as such.

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We’re told from an absurdly young age to find our life’s purpose; this message is continually drilled into our brains at every educational milestone. Then we’re taught as adults that we should keep steady goals to maintain a certain level of accepted productivity that will lead us to the picture-perfect life well lived. And we reach for these goals endlessly, even when our life is feeling very purposeless.

And what greater goal is there than happiness? It is the crème de la crème of life objectives, after all. It is used as the carrot dangled in front of us in every commercial and every advertisement and every institution. We want happiness, we need it, we deserve it, and most importantly, we CAN obtain it – all of us, whenever we want. If you don’t have it, then you are the problem that needs to be straightened out. It is one of the most dangerous stories stitched into the very fabric of Western society.

Happiness is never represented as it should be – a fleeting emotion that creates this beautiful buffer between the harsh realities of our daily lives; one that many find hard to obtain, and almost all find even harder to make stick around.

A common definition of happiness that has found its way floating around the internet is “reality minus expectations.” Now this definition clearly has some flaws, but it sure taps into something we all know about happiness. No matter how awe-inspiring the moment in front of us is, if it didn’t meet our expectations of that moment, then any enjoyment of it is accompanied by this far-reaching disappointment.

It would seem that in many or most cases, the problem isn’t what’s in front of us in the least. After all, we live in a world that by definition is an utter miracle. We are surrounded by the perfect environment for us to flourish and thrive in a universal sense. Yet it is our expectations that fling us ‘back to reality,’ back to the moment-to-moment hardships that cut deep and sting us in a way that seems entirely unfair.

Perhaps our scale wouldn’t be so tipped in the favor of expectations if we had not built entire storylines around happiness as the end all be all of life objectives. Your life will never feel perfect if you think a perfect life is a life that is always happy. I don’t believe your life will ever be perfect if you even think that a perfect life is a life where you’re mostly happy. But what if you your goal was to always grow intellectually, spiritually, emotionally, mentally? What if your goal was to help others more than you hurt them? It would be a simple goal, sure. It would probably be pretty easy to meet, also. But man, if we all shared that one simply, easy, little goal we would see the entire world change overnight.

Instead we find ourselves on a race to nowhere. We reach that next accomplishment only to find that we still lie awake at night wondering what it’s all for. And these stories fail us over and over again because it makes us look at ourselves in the mirror and wonder where we went wrong. We hide our pain and we hide our worries because if you’re not happy, then you’re the problem, and who wants to be that? There is something very inhumane about plastering on a smile, yet it is the absolute expectation – we even promote research about how faking a smile can lead to genuine feelings of happiness. These are the lessons we are fed on our Facebook feeds.

I have decided that happiness will no longer be one of my goals, and it certainly is not my purpose. I want to be fueled by my own personal growth. I want to be incited by how much I can dissect the stories around me from what is real, finding myself on a constant journey towards truth and understanding in a way that goes deep, far past the shallow thoughts we allow to occupy our minds when we idle. I want to help people, for no other reason than being a human being can fucking suck sometimes and it is all of our responsibilities to make this life a little easier to get through.

And I don’t think that will make me happy all the time, but I don’t think anything will. And maybe it’s better that way. Perhaps the world would be a happier place if we found meaning outside of happiness.

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For most of my years on this Earth, my most significant goal and greatest intention was to hide my deepest, darkest existential thoughts as best I could – existential woes, feelings of meaninglessness, obsessing over the absurd nature of reality behind human existence. I had to hide them because facing them was too hard.

I’ve since found two harrowing truths on my own journey towards self-actualization and self-awareness. Hiding from these realities doesn’t solve them. Facing them head on doesn’t make them any less scary…or any easier for that matter.

Bravery should count for something in this world: looking inwards before looking outwards is perhaps the toughest road to take. Yet the greatest minds I’ve ever encountered and the greatest thoughts I’ve ever read have all come from teachers and thinkers who knew that truth lies beyond our egos.

We live in an age where information is at our fingertips, yet we can’t seem to learn from our past. For hundreds of thousands of years our species was simply trying to survive. We are a generation born into the luxury of modernization that allows us free time and free mental space to create, wonder, imagine and cooperate. So let’s talk about who we are and what we want out of life and why so much of the world around us has turned to shit. We owe it to ourselves and those who come after us to question how these worldwide norms and intrinsic power imbalances have created a system designed to exploit, disparage and dehumanize.

We don’t just have to regurgitate new age mottos or recycle the same philosophical quotes on our Instagram feeds; we can use rational thought and creativity and logic and humanity and humility and we can come up with new thoughts and new ideas about the world we’re in and the world we want to create.

Let’s talk about this shit instead of lying in bed at night keeping this inner turmoil held so tightly inside it doesn’t allow our eyelids to close until the sun’s coming up and another day of monotony is at our doorstep. We cannot allow bitterness to consume us. We cannot allow difficult roads to lead us to inaction. The first step is to look inward and to begin breaking down.

I hope you join me on this exploration of meaning, philosophy, morality, politics, norms, purpose, and anything else that pops up along the way.