Existential Dread

I know that none of things I like to do are important. I know making a few little tunes and piecing together a few words do not make one bit of difference to the world. I know that perhaps nothing any of us do has any importance at all, and yet we place so much importance on the meaning of our lives and improving ourselves and humanity.

Sometimes I zoom out to look at the big picture and all I see is one day homo sapiens will be extinct (phew!), the Earth will become an uninhabitable rock (possibly our fault if it happens sooner than necessary), and maybe all this fuss about bettering our future is kind of pointless. Because not only are we going to die, individually, but so too will our species. And did the dinosaurs ever ponder these things? Or did they not worry about existential threats and just carry on with their lives?

There's something to be said for the keep-calm-and-carry-on attitude, but there's also something to be said for sitting with what you must in order to process things, but then we're all going to die anyway, so who cares? Right?

Are my stories and musical concoctions important enough for me to stress over? Do I really have so much to do that I can't think straight?

I suppose the world ticks in a way that's urgent and financial and very very busy and well, that's just capitalism, isn't it.

It's not something I want a part of, but it's something I'm in. As much as I try to sit aside from all of that, it's kind of the same as trying to sit aside from the discomfort of watching genocide and climate change from the sidelines, isn't it.

Try as we might, we can't disconnect from that which forcibly connects us. But, I suppose, we can try to inspire change, and we can try to have a little fun while we're at it. In the long term it may be futile, but in the short term it makes our existence a little more bearable.