Chaos.

It's not supposed to make sense.

Life doesn’t make sense.

Have you ever wondered why that is?

Most accounts claim intelligent humans have been around for about 50,000 years. There have been 108 billion of us, give or take.

So collectively, humanity has had a combined 5.4 trillion years or so to figure this whole thing out.

But we haven’t, right?

You still feel confused sometimes.

You still wonder if you’re doing the right thing.

You still feel doubt, still feel guilt, still feel shame, still feel sadness.

In 5.4 trillion years, we haven’t figured it out. And we never will.

Why? 

We want order.

The universe prefers chaos.

---

Human nature dictates that we crave a few things:

• Order

• Control

• Neatness

So we say hate is the opposite of love.

We say joy is the opposite of sorrow.

We say good is the opposite of bad.

Because that’s neat. And orderly. And it fits into clean boxes for easy storage.

But none of it is true.

The universe is colossal, complex, and chaotic. It doesn’t care about how we want to perceive things.

So we want hate to be the opposite of love, but the universe doesn’t even register those two concepts. In theory, emotions should be orderly and defined, but in practice, they’re messy and complicated. They don’t fit in those nice neat boxes because they’re a result of trying to wrap human constraints around an inhuman universe.

So life gets cloudy. We get confused. And we wonder if there’s something wrong.

---

In our attempts to interpret the world, we turn to others. Because even though we know we’re flawed, it’s nice to believe that somewhere along the line, someone figured out what’s going on.

So we look at philosophers — people who made it their life’s work to figure this whole thing out.

But then we read about how Thomas Hobbes said humans are naturally selfish, only to have Jean-Jacques Rousseau claim humans are naturally good.

We hear about how Rene Descartes defined the “self,” only to have David Hume turn around and question if the self even exists.

If you look at any philosophy, you’ll find clashing idea after clashing idea. Makes sense, doesn’t it? Philosophers try to solve humanity’s eternal questions.

Tough to do when you only get 77 years here.

---

To make sense of it all, many of us — myself included — lean on guidelines put forth by beings that aren’t human. We turn to the Bible or the Vedas or the Quran, easily forgetting that if we were born in a different part of the world, we’d likely be reading a different book.

And around and around we go trying to make sense of a world that doesn’t even know we’re here.

We will always try to make mental models that mold life into manageable components. That effort will always be in vain.

We’re human — the universe isn’t. Oil, meet water.

So relax a little bit.

Feel confused.

Today won’t make sense.

Neither will tomorrow.

That’s how it’s supposed to be.

Isn’t that freeing?