From time to time, more often than I would like, I have a full blown existential crisis. It can be triggered by something as simple as a YouTube video, suggested to me by YouTube, that is a cancer patient talking about their final days.
That's what it was today.
Given we're (largely) engineers and science minded folks here, I ask HN: How do you handle deep existential questions?
More specifically, here are some questions I really struggle with:
- How do you deal with the fact that we don't know why anything at all exists? Why, for instance, do atoms, subatomic particles, etc, exist AT ALL? Why not NOTHING?
- How do you deal with the fact that your life is meaningless. You will die and - at best - leave behind a legacy for history books. More likely, you will die and it will be completely insignificant. To put it another way: How do you deal with the fact that your life is MEANINGLESS?
- How do you deal with the likelihood that you will suffer greatly at some point in the future, whether it be from cancer, or some other disease? How does a day of 9-5 work, capped off with a horrible prolonged cancer treatment at the end of your life, not corrupt your mind?
If you don't have a purpose, find a purpose for yourself. Everyone is insignificant, so why try to be significant to everyone? Just be significant to your friends. Show up in the world. And do things that matter to you.
Forget about the unanswerable questions. They're unanswerable, and they'll only trip you up. Go be around people, and let them remind you why you're alive. Go whistle in the dark for a while.