Not you, not anything you have or ever will create, means a thing, and there is no way out or around it. That applies to you, me, and every snowflake in the world, even those chinese no-sunday snowflakes in sweatshops that make labour camps looks like tea parties. In the end they will have sewed your shoes for precisely one zilch.

If I’d be me, I’d have two questions now – first – what makes you think so and – second – what are you proposing. Third could be why are you telling me this, to which there is no definite answer.

Scale. Let’s borrow from astrophysics. Imagine zooming out – you, your house, your street, your city, your country, your continent—you know how they zoom out in those flying movies – everything becomes smaller, then the clouds come, and then we are through the clouds, we are in the space – your planet – our planet, boom—planet Earth. Let’s keep zooming. Solar system, solar system neighbourhood (there are many of those), galaxy, galactic group (there are quite a few galaxies in a group), supercluster (quite a few groups in a supercluster), and then finally The Thing itself – the observable universe. The word microscopic doesn’t even start to describe the scale of humanity. Micronanoinfinitesimalistic. And you and I are but micronanoinfinitesimites of the micronanoinfinitesimilastic world.

Purpose. Fine, you and I say in revolt, so what if we are nothing compared to everything and everything compared to nothing (mr Pascal liked to say that a lot and today we like mr Pascal. He comes from long ago). At least we can have a purpose between us, micronanoinfinitesimites. Let’s shorten that to manofinimites. Our manofinimite world can still have a purpose, we object in chorus.

Let’s examine exhibit A – my dog. Let me tell you about the exact purpose of my dog’s life – it’s utterly and excruciatingly pointless. He spends most of his waking life sleeping. And the few hours a day that he is, in fact, awake, he spends trapped with me. Make no mistake – my dog has an excellent life, better than average, I’d say. He is hardly ever alone, we go for long walks, and he is well cared for and gets plenty of affection. But there is zero purpose in his life. We will go like this for about 10 years, and then he, being the dog, will cease to exist.

Except for very brief excursions, the lives of two of us are physically exactly the same, with the only difference being that my dog doesn’t know how to read and the concept of the screen is lost on him entirely. So what exactly is so different here that would suddenly give birth to a purpose?

That doesn’t mean we should despair and harakirize ourselves out of the existence, of course, for the inverse is also true – it’s not just that we don’t matter – nothing matters, and while there is no purpose to pursue, there is also no unpurpose.

So, hey – what makes you tick? Let’s write a three year plan for living like there’s no tomorrow.