The paradox of existence

Nobody asked to be born. That is the uncomfortable starting point of anti nationalism.

Before a child exists there is no reason for happiness, no consciousness hoping to experience live or friendship or success or sunlight or music or anything else that makes life beautiful. There is simply nothing. Then two people make a decision on behalf of someone who does not exist and yet suddenly that person is thrown into existence without being consulted.

An existance that comes with a price. A child may experience happiness. They may fall in love and build friendshipsbor discover passion ot laugh unitolt heor stomach hurts and find reasons to be grateful for being alive.

But none of these things are guaranteed. They only thing that is gaurenteed is pain.

At some point that child will experience rejection. Someone they love will disappoint them. They may lose a parent or a friend or a partner or eventually someone they cannot imagine living without. Theyr body will age. They may become sick. They will experience loneliness and financial pressure and humiliation and anxiety and failure and grief.

And eventually regardless of how successful their journey was,they will die. Parents sinnot know which verison of life their child will live.

They imaginr a happy childhood, a successful career, a loving and lasting marriage and a peaceful old age. But they cannot guarantee any of it. They cannot promise that their child will escape depression, abuse, poverty, war, illness, betrayal, heartbreak or simply the quiet dissatisfaction of living a life that never becomes what they hoped that it would.

This is where anti Nationalism becomes distrubing.

We often say that having children is actually if love. But is it also the act of gambling? Er gamble with someone's entire existence.

A sunset can be worth seeing. Love can be extraordinary. Friendship can make existence feel meaningful. A child may grow up and genuinely say I am glad that I was born. But SOMEONE being grateful that they are born does not mean that they are consented tk ridh before recieving it.

Anti-nationalism forces us to confront an idea most people would rather avoid
We do not carry life because somebody asked for it. We carete it because we decided that the possiblity of a good life was worth the rush if bad one.

And perhaps the darkest part is that the person who last that prove is never the person who made the decision.

We spend an enormous part of our lives trying to find meaning. We want to know why we are here and what are we supposed to accomplish and whether our lives matter and whether everything we experience jas some larger purpose behind it.

We build careers and fall in love and raise families and create art, music and chase money and pursue recognition and leave behind thing that we hope that will outline us.

But..what if the universe doens't care?

Not it a cruel way. Not because it is against us. Simply because it have no reason to care about us.

The universe existed long before anyone has arrived and unless humanity somehow survives for an imaginably long time, it will continue to exist even after every person who will even live is gone. Starts will explode. Planets will disappear. Civilizations will raise and collapse.

And none of it will require our approval. This is where the idea of The Absurd becomes uncomfortable. Human beings desperately wants meaning and order and explanation while the universe iffyer no obvious answers.

We ask What is the purpose of life and the universe remains silent.

We may spend decades working towards something only to die before seeing it's full consequences. Seimine may become incredibly wealthy and still be empty inside. Someone may dedicate their life to helping others and still experience terrible suffering all alone. There is no universal scoreboard to announce who lived correctly and perfectly.

That can sound horrifying. But perhaps the absence of pre determined meaning does not automatically make life meaningless.

If meaning is not waiting somewhere in the universe for us to discover then perhaps we can create it ourself.

A friendshop can matter because we decide that the person matters. A career can matter because that work means something to us. A song can matter to us because they may eventually disappear from our memories. A life can matter without being constantly important.

But there is another uncomfortable possibility. If we are the ones creating meaning then the meaning mayb be fragile. The things we consider important are important nevismr conscious beings experience them as important. Removes tha person and the meaning disappear with them.

That does not make love fake.

It makes love temporary. And perhaps that is the real confrontation with the absurd.

We want our lives to have some permenent significance written into the fabric of reality. Instead we may simply be clueless and trying to make sense of our temporary existence.

We could spend our entire life trying ti escape death. We exercise, take medicine and build hospitals and preserve memories and search for ways to expand humans life span. Death feels like the ultimate injustice because it takes everything we have built and loved and experienced.

But imagine that deaths simply stopped stopped. You could life forever.

At first it sounds like a greatest gift imaginable. No final Good bye. No hear if running out of time. You could learn every single language and visit every country and master every profession and watch civilizations change and experience centuries that no humans being has ever witnessed.

But eventually Something distrubing might happen. Youw ould stop running out of time. And perhaps that is the thing that makes time valuable than anything else.


Today an ordinary things matter partly because it cannot be repeated forever. A conversation with someone we live matters more because there will be a time that will eventually be the last one. A brithday matter because there will eventually be the final birthday. Even childhood becomes precious because it disappears. That is we don't know the value of childhood until it is over.

Remove the ending and the meaning attached to it may began to disappear with it. If you had infinite amount of tomorrow would you do anything today?

There would always be another oppertunity. You could learn the piano next century. Travel after another thousand years. Read that book you always wanted eventually. Call someone Tommorow. Then Tommorow would become another tomorrow and another and another.

Perhaps Immortality would not like infinitely meaningful. Perhaps it would make everything infinitly postponed.

There is also the problem of loss. If you lives forever while everyone else remained immortal you would repeatedly watch everyone disappear. Friends would die. Partners would die. Children would die. Entire generations would vanish. And yet, you will live and survive it all. But...was it worth it?

You would remember going to a thousands of funerals. You can watch the city you few up with and the city where you fell in love with that one person for the first time may become ruins. Imagine your mother tongue disappearing and cultures changing and places you love becoming unrecognisable.

And personally ot would not be a problem for me because I can't even live for the minimum time span for a human being without being crushed by every soul and practically...why would I even want to be immortal? Lol.

Imagine being offered a machine that could give you everything you have ever wanted. You could be loved by a perfect person and become extraordinarily successful and have unlimited money and help the poor and experience constant power and live through memory so beautiful that you would never want to leave them.


But. There is only one condition. Your body would remain inside a machine while your brain experience and entirely manufactured life. You would believe you were traveling and falling in love and winning and achieving and being admired and loved. You would feel every emotion exactly as how you would feel in reality.

You would be happy. So why not plug in?

That question sometimes is more distrubing than it initially sounds.

If happiness is what we truly want them perhaps reality should not matter. Right? If a manufactured experience feels exactly like genuine happiness what difference does it make whether the experience actually happened?

Most people hesitate. Why?
Because apparently we want more from life than pleasant feelings. We want our achivements to be real. We want the oooele who live us genuinely love us. We want our choices to have real consequences. We want to know that the person we became was actually built through our experience father than programed to our mind

Imagine becoming the most successful version of yourself inside a machine. You have the career you wanted. You have the relationship that you dreamed of. The respect that you always deserved. But none of it exists. Everything is just programmed into your head. Nothing real.


Nobody actually loves you. Nobody really admired you untill you have done what has to be done in reality. You simply experienced the sensation of having done so.

Would that be enough? Perhaps the most distrubing answer is that some may say okay to it since the destination is same no matter the journey (my opinion).

But when I asked this question to a friend of mine they said that they have a part of them that wants to struggle and actually deserve the oppertunity and relationships they got instead of jumping and feeling it on the simulation.

A simple analogy that comes to my mind if that your favourite food will taste better when you are hungry than when you are full. The good did not change. Youy hunger and the story behind that waiting is changed. You can feel the taste of it better when you are at your empty stomach and can appreciate and be grateful for it more when you have worked for it.

So now I ask you...If you could have a perfect life knowing that it was fake, would you really want to wake up?