This morning I was in a bobo coffee shop in the center of Paris. I saw this :

If you write that, you probably feel the exact opposite. We speak most of what we lack. Deep down in your heart, you certainly feel that nobody cares. That the meaning of your life isn’t so clear. And see this short text as performative, a spell, an incantation, whose primary recipient is the author themselves. You are certainly afraid that things may not matter, and seek solace.

But suppose it didn’t matter, why would it be so dramatic ?

If you think about it, one could perfectly accept that the universe is indifferent to their existence. If nothing matters, everything becomes lighter, you are free to play, love, create without expecting any external validation. You can simply enjoy the moment. Look at animals, a lion spends its life being a lion, not trying to leave a trace or to “matter”. It becomes dramatic the moment you feel the need for things to matter.

And let’s be honest, most of us want our life to matter one way or another. If you dig long enough, you realize the root cause for that is the consciousness of our upcoming death. Not just because “I will disappear”, but because “everything I am, everything I love, all I’ve endured, all I’ve done, all that will be wiped out and gone forever”. Animals don’t care, they don’t know. Humans see their end, and it feels like an injustice : “how could all these things that matter so much to me end up in nothing ?”

Escape routes

Once you have come to this realization, there are two main ways to not end up completely depressed (that are not entirely incompatible) :

1. Finding an external guarantee of meaning : God and religion, History, posterity, children… something above you that validates your worth, the value of your existence.

2. Radical acceptance of the universe’s indifference. Nothing remains, but it is counterbalanced by the beauty of the instant.

Quite visibly, the author of this little text struggles with that second option. They’ve not accepted that they did not matter. No one can blame them, for it is incredibly hard, it demands an internal conversion, a switch from a sense of symbolic survival to a logic of pure immediacy.

It certainly was loneliness and invisibility (a foretaste of our ultimate fate) that pushed them to write this text. An urge to resist this truth that you feel, a desire to exist in others’ eyes, in their memories, in their hearts… and to protest : “No, my life will not be swallowed just like that, without a trace”.

But they are stuck right between the two escape routes : they’ve lost (or rejected) the religious guarantee of meaning, yet cannot handle the vertigo of nonsense. Therefore, they build a small totem out of fear and scrawl : « it matters ». Fragile patch-up job to calm the angst. Embrace the universe’s indifference and say instead : « It doesn’t, and that’s fine ».

Paul

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