Each generation faces the shift of being proven wrong by the next generation.
And every generation imagine itself to be the smartest one in history.
Luckily, reality proves us constantly and irrevocably wrong about the world we live in.
The other day I was returning home from work thinking about the future of the universe.
I was pondering the eventual demise of everything. How it’s all going to come to naught and how the Sun will turn into a red giant and engulf our planet and the solar system, and burn it into oblivion.
Somehow this realization made me feel at peace with my eventual demise, which will naturally come much, much sooner than all of that. Since I know that nothing exists forever, that makes one at peace with oneself.
I find solace in the final countdown of the cosmos. The entropy of the universe gives everything value, including our mortality.
Somehow, most people live as if they were magicians on top of the world. They can’t accept their mortality nor can they compose with the eventual demise of everything.
We delude ourselves into believing that our generation is the best there ever was and that we know better than anyone before us. Yet, a short and sparse review of the historical record will show that all generations nurtured the same illusions.
And all of them, without fail, were proven wrong by the ineluctable future.
Still, we keep on sucking on that wicked pipe dream of our imagined excellence as if our inner peace depended on it. We know that’s the true truth. Because we do, and it is.
Götterdämmerung 