It must be the wrong question.

When I’m down, or stuck with something, there’s often a whingeing mental voice telling me that what I’m doing is pointless, or that the way I live my life is pointless.

But I don’t know that anything is pointful, if you analyse it rigorously enough. You’re going to die and you can’t take it with you; your kids, your precious grandchildren are going to die and they can’t take it with them, either. In four generations’ time, your genetic/cultural influence will most likely be forgotten or spread so thinly as to be negligible.

Your house and garden will eventually collapse over the cliffs into the sea. Everything the illusory entity you call “you” thinks that it “knows” will be “proven” false. Your expertise will evaporate into Alzheimerian haze. Russia will invade. Entropy will increase. The Large Hadron Collider will conjure up a black hole which will swallow Europe. China will invade. There’ll be a holocaust, there’ll be an asteroid strike, the solar system will become unstable and collapse into the sun. The sun will inflate into a red giant and engulf the Earth. The Milky Way will collide with another galaxy. Another Big Bang will take place just around the cosmic corner. All the atoms will decay into quarks. The Leichtensteinian empire will invade. All the quarks will decay into superstrings and then the superstrings will decay, presumably into normal strings.

It must be the wrong question. If you find yourself asking it, that’s a warning bell: simply learn to live more skillfully, just engage with that learning process, regardless of outcome; and one aspect of engagement in the process should be to avoid whinging about whether there’s a point.

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