Classmates, teachers, parents, school board, administrators...
Over the course of my 13 years in the school system, I’ve heard plenty of complaints from classmates. “Too much homework”, “the tests are too hard”, and “the teacher is horrible” were always staples, but there is one claim that I wish to focus on tonight. One gripe that overshadows the rest in complexity and pernicity, a compromise with the very heart of the flaws in the western world:
“That doesn’t matter. I’ll never use it anyway.”
What a simple little statement. To the naive it seems harmless, simply pushing responsibility away and coping with the sheer magnitude of the complexity of the world, but it reaches deeper than that, for this statement leads one swiftly on the path to nihilism - or the belief that nothing matters. With every use, its personal importance increases, moving up one’s hierarchy of meaning until its vacuum consumes all, is all. You do poorly on a test… it doesn’t matter. You fail a class… it doesn’t matter. You lose your job… it doesn’t matter, we’re all going to die anyway. But that’s the thing, the statement is actually psychologically false, phenomenologically false. Even as your physical body rots away the fruits of your labor will live on, implicit in the actions of those around, and even a great distance, from you.
This brings me, logically, of course, to the renowned Second Law of Thermodynamics, stating quite simply that entropy, or disorder, increases over time. With that in mind, let’s get two simple, and relatively self-evident, definitions out of the way. One, time increases as humans age, meaning that the change in time between birth and death is positive. Two, entropy, or randomness, can be attributed to the magnitude of interactions (both explicit and implicit) within the closed system of the Earth.
With the boring definitions out of the way, we can start to piece this together. The inherent fluctuations in one's life result in inaccurate measurements of meaning when taken at specific instances, but this can be solved by finding the area under the function of your meaning - an integral. Because of the increase in time over the course of your life, we can set time initial and time final as the bounds. The minute nature of each interaction you make establishes it a perfect candidate for dx, which leaves us seeking only a definition for the term we are integrating. Because it is this term that constitutes the bulk of our result, a crude definition would be one’s propensity towards meaning.
Putting it together, there’s one thing that immediately becomes evident. If you are nihilistic, if your propensity towards meaning is zero, because the integration of zero is always zero, the meaning you will get out of life is no different, zero. This means that all one must do to break the bond, to climb out of that gaping pit that consumes many, is to simply believe that meaning exists. Because, in fact, any other opinion results in meaning in abundance. Looking more explicitly towards the real world, we can consider something like the Butterfly Effect. When applied to your life, it is found that your actions have impacts far beyond what you can even comprehend. And I truly can’t think of a better definition of meaning. Something that matters, something that brings promise and outlives you. If you respect the fact that your actions have consequences, that everything you do will impact those around you, a new life opens up, one filled with hope, with that very meaning we seek.
This past year has been rough for most of us. We’ve seen fear, mistrust, death. We’ve walked in the very shadow of chaos. The world has reminded us of the complexity that we face, both externally and internally, and brought many to the brink of that foe that lurks in the shadows of our psychological landscape: nihilism. But I urge you, as you go out from this place, as you turn the page to the next chapter of your life, remember one thing, what you do really does mean something.
Treat life as if the very fabric of the cosmos yearns for your contribution. Treat every person as if they matter, treat everything you do as if it matters, treat each moment as if it matters, because the funny thing is, all you have to do is believe, and it will.
Over the course of my 13 years in the school system, I’ve heard plenty of complaints from classmates. “Too much homework”, “the tests are too hard”, and “the teacher is horrible” were always staples, but there is one claim that I wish to focus on tonight. One gripe that overshadows the rest in complexity and pernicity, a compromise with the very heart of the flaws in the western world:
“That doesn’t matter. I’ll never use it anyway.”
What a simple little statement. To the naive it seems harmless, simply pushing responsibility away and coping with the sheer magnitude of the complexity of the world, but it reaches deeper than that, for this statement leads one swiftly on the path to nihilism - or the belief that nothing matters. With every use, its personal importance increases, moving up one’s hierarchy of meaning until its vacuum consumes all, is all. You do poorly on a test… it doesn’t matter. You fail a class… it doesn’t matter. You lose your job… it doesn’t matter, we’re all going to die anyway. But that’s the thing, the statement is actually psychologically false, phenomenologically false. Even as your physical body rots away the fruits of your labor will live on, implicit in the actions of those around, and even a great distance, from you.
This brings me, logically, of course, to the renowned Second Law of Thermodynamics, stating quite simply that entropy, or disorder, increases over time. With that in mind, let’s get two simple, and relatively self-evident, definitions out of the way. One, time increases as humans age, meaning that the change in time between birth and death is positive. Two, entropy, or randomness, can be attributed to the magnitude of interactions (both explicit and implicit) within the closed system of the Earth.
With the boring definitions out of the way, we can start to piece this together. The inherent fluctuations in one's life result in inaccurate measurements of meaning when taken at specific instances, but this can be solved by finding the area under the function of your meaning - an integral. Because of the increase in time over the course of your life, we can set time initial and time final as the bounds. The minute nature of each interaction you make establishes it a perfect candidate for dx, which leaves us seeking only a definition for the term we are integrating. Because it is this term that constitutes the bulk of our result, a crude definition would be one’s propensity towards meaning.
Putting it together, there’s one thing that immediately becomes evident. If you are nihilistic, if your propensity towards meaning is zero, because the integration of zero is always zero, the meaning you will get out of life is no different, zero. This means that all one must do to break the bond, to climb out of that gaping pit that consumes many, is to simply believe that meaning exists. Because, in fact, any other opinion results in meaning in abundance. Looking more explicitly towards the real world, we can consider something like the Butterfly Effect. When applied to your life, it is found that your actions have impacts far beyond what you can even comprehend. And I truly can’t think of a better definition of meaning. Something that matters, something that brings promise and outlives you. If you respect the fact that your actions have consequences, that everything you do will impact those around you, a new life opens up, one filled with hope, with that very meaning we seek.
This past year has been rough for most of us. We’ve seen fear, mistrust, death. We’ve walked in the very shadow of chaos. The world has reminded us of the complexity that we face, both externally and internally, and brought many to the brink of that foe that lurks in the shadows of our psychological landscape: nihilism. But I urge you, as you go out from this place, as you turn the page to the next chapter of your life, remember one thing, what you do really does mean something.
Treat life as if the very fabric of the cosmos yearns for your contribution. Treat every person as if they matter, treat everything you do as if it matters, treat each moment as if it matters, because the funny thing is, all you have to do is believe, and it will.