On life, universe, and everything
From the title, it’s evident that I am not going to be talking about programming, or software engineering. This essay is about how I feel about everything but me. When I started questioning my decisions involving career, the traits I’ve picked up on my own and by the virtue of my upbringing, I turned to the web as every other millennial/Gen-z does.
What were my questions?
- The first question I found myself asking is What am I here for? or to put it in a more ‘known’ way, Why does my existence matter? Clearly, with a population of ~7 billion, my job, the work that I am doing or will be doing, can be done by a replacement of ‘plant99’. However incapable/capable I am of doing my tasks, there is someone else who can replace me. Why am ‘I’ assigned as a variable to this instance in space-time?
- The second question I did to myself is Does my work matter? or Does anybody’s work matter? The universe has existed for ~13 billion years, and us humans are only here in this planet for the past 200, 000 years. ‘Very soon’(in this context), your great-great-(2000x) son might breathe with ears. So will all your ‘scaling Y to 2X users’, and ‘speeding up Y function by 5.6 seconds’ matter by then?
- Is there an absolute right/wrong? I.e Is there a rulebook, something which ‘a god’ refers to and evaluate all of your doings? Even then, till date, we don’t have scientific proof of an afterlife or rebirth. Why should you care?
What answers do I believe I found?
First of all the questions I found answers to, is “Is/Are there god(s)?”. With so many religions practiced around the globe by so many people, it’d be very ignorant to say that a certain religion is perfect, its god(s) is/are authentic. On the other hand, I have always thought ‘gods’/’fate’ decides the victim of a certain event. So treating all these events as ‘random’, ergo, discarding the existence of god(s) is too silly for me.
I reached to a middle-ground, where I thought this ‘randomness’, ‘fate’, ‘god(s)’, is a multi-dimensional equation, yet unsolved by us humans. Say an event’s occurrence, in association with a certain entity(person/animal/object) is given by (x-k1)(y-k2)(z-k3)…(Vn-Kn). Where x, y, z, …Vn are variables. k1, k2…Kn are constants yet unknown. Now say each of these factors of this equation is a ‘god factor’,activated by your doings, traits, etc. One may choose to change this value by changing (z-k3), or by changing (x-k1). This is equivalent to worshipping different gods. Summing it up, I believe there is a big equation/god watching over us living beings, and thus associating events with us. Note that, I still couldn’t find a way to believe in afterlife/rebirth. A couple of days ago while eating my cup of noodles, I realized
If god(the random equation) were a systems engineer, they/it built the most fail-proof, secure system till date which has modules like afterlife, rebirth, other metaphysical components.
And the smartest of the species inhabiting earth still hasn’t found a back-door to the system.
The second major answer I found is to the question “Why do I matter? ”. I’d recommend watching this video from Kurzgesagt, and Ryan Dahl’s(yeah, creator of Node.Js!) opinions in this blogpost.
I settled with
“ Nothing matters in a broad span of time. ”
Things which you work for, be it financial security, social status, economic status, nothing matters. Period. They do however matter for a short period of time. ‘Short’ here, is not fixed. Let’s take an example of a banker who makes a lot of money, has a big house, cars, loves his/her work, has a beautiful family. Shit happens, and he/she gets arrested falsely after investigation on an investment fraud. He/she gets a heart-attack and dies. ‘Short’ in this case, is 12 days. In another scenario, after a year of spending in prison, the court found he/she isn’t guilty, and the state pays him/her a handsome compensation for loss of reputation, and other damage caused. Better than that, what if the person was anyway planning to retire the same day he was arrested. All these cases suggest that nothing is predictable.
Say someone dies, their friends and kins mourn for days, weeks, years. But ultimately, there is a point when their name is taken for the last time, as they say. After that, your existence is forgotten. People might remember your work for 5,10,50,100,2000 years or more. For instance, there was a chief architect of The Great Bath, we do not remember their name, it was just 4000 years ago. One might argue that there weren’t as sophisticated ways to preserve history like we do now(Oh hi, SSDs). But let’s face it, a massive flood, or solar storm could destroy ‘all’ the data in the planet. After all, the Harappan people might have been thinking as highly of the stone-carvings, as we do now of SSDs.
So to answer the question “Do you matter?”. No! But who cares, while you’re in this planet for however short/long period of time, do the things you love. Do the things which make you feel satisfied! Do the things which make you feel alive! Help people when they need it, wish good things to strangers you meet(without saying out loud, duh!), wish good things for the flora and fauna around you. And most importantly, stop your bicycle when you see an ant-crossing, leap over ’em. Thanks, the ant community.
N.B: *things is a subset of morally correct actions, please don’t justify a murder with the above statements.
Finally, “Why does your work matter? ”.
Paul Graham, co-founder of Y.Combinator wrote this amazing blog. Here, he talks mostly about the purpose of life, wise ways to ‘choose’ what you work on, how to ‘evaluate’ oneself if they are working on the appropriate problem statement.
Now, as I’ve said before, it’s hard to gather facts that support the statement that one’s life matters. What matters for a rather considerable and longer period of time, is their work. Consider all the big names we know in all major fields starting from Albert Einstein, Vincent Van Gogh, Ferdinand Magellan, Alan Turing, Galileo, Neils Bohr, Newton, Thomas Edison(Cough!), N.Tesla, among many others. The major reason we remember them all by, is their work. Now this is debatable as well, Paul in his essay wrote about how you think your work matters for a long period of time, but at the end it doesn’t. Consider how some pre-socratic philosophers like Thales, Anaximenes, were left out of mainstream history of sciences because their work wasn’t relevant. One might spend their entire life working on a problem statement and yet not reaching any conclusion in the subject, just because they picked the wrong thing to work on. Paul says, this is scary as these examples are harder to find than the successful ones.
So after reading this, would you give up whatever you were doing and start binging on Netflix? Or would you start working day and night to be the next Einstein/Marie Curie? My suggestion, neither. Here’s something I find relevant.
Let your concern (or focus) be on your action, let it not be on the outcome of the action. Do not act only out of expectation of a result, but then do not slip into inactivity.
—Bhagavad Gita/Old Chinese proverb/Yoda
Footnote:
Even after all this data, I complain “Why should I not completely live in the present, or completely work for the future?”. It’s foolish to do so I guess, I am not sure if it’s wise but I try to put 50% of my efforts on the former, and 50% on the latter, overall. “Loving your job”, is a good way to go. Even if you don’t now, take some time and change it to something which is a good centroid among your interests, and all the other things that you desire. Even if you consider all this as bs, your takeaway is the following. If things go right, “Yay! I did it”. If things don’t, “Meh, what does it matter?”.