Hello shxdows. Welcome to episode two of the shxdowcast, and let's just dive right into it. No prose-y intro today. The title of this comm is You're Nothing, We're Nothing, and That's Okay. So what does that really mean? Well, ultimately it just means that humans aren't special. Life isn't even special. It's just an emergent byproduct an inevitability that's meaningless in the grand scheme of things. But that's okay, because what that means is it gives you way more agency over your own life and what you live for.

Before we can dive deeper in to what that really means, we gotta define life from like a technical, scientific perspective. And I'm gonna heavily paraphrasing and in a nutshelling a lot of this following section. So please do your own research if you want more fulfilling, enriching context. And I'm gonna be representing what is the, uh, prevailing consensus in the scientific community. But it is only one viewpoint. There's a lot of alternate theories around, uh, what's called abiogenesis or the origin of life. so again, highly encourage you. If you want more context to please go ahead and do your own research. But , for our thought exercise, let's go ahead and define life . And let's go from the definition that it has to have three components in order to be considered alive. Okay? It needs the presence of metabolism, which is some sort of cycles to sustain itself. Energy wise. It needs to be able to replicate itself. It needs to be able to reproduce, okay? And it needs to have some sort of separation between itself and whatever is not itself. What that means in a reality sense is it means it needs to have some sort of cell wall or membrane that can keep all of its innards inside and, uh, all of the outside environment outside. From school, you may have learned that the smallest thing that we can consider to be alive is called the cell, uh, otherwise called the building block of life. And a cell has all three of those things, and it's the smallest thing that we can really see that has all three of those things. It has the, ability to sustain itself with metabolism using a process of converting any various sources of, uh, resources around it, into energy, um, using either like a mitochondria or any other manner of cell organs. Um, and also has the ability to reproduce. It can split itself into two and make an exact copy of itself, which is kind of cool if you think about it. And not only that, but it has that cell wall, that membrane around it that separates itself from the outside world and also allows it to filter what's going in and out, uh, of itself, right. So. If we really start thinking about what a cell is , it is really just a component of chemicals, right? Like we can map the exact chemical structure of what is in a cell, you know, things that are like carbon, hydrogen, water, ammonia. These are elements and compounds that you can find on the periodic table, right? Things that are definitely not alive, but somehow can combine into something that is considered to be alive. Not only able to sustain itself in a cycle, but also make a complete clone of itself. Like that's just kind of crazy to think about. Look, how do we go from something that's not alive to something that is alive. Okay. I feel like after we get to the alive point, you know, after we get a cell, the rest of you know, life evolution to get to where we are in humanity makes sense. If you just subscribe to natural selection and evolution, right?


But how do we go from literally elements that are not considered alive to suddenly it's sustaining itself, reproducing and separated from the rest of its environment consistently. And the answer to that question's actually pretty boring. It, uh, essentially is the same answer to why everything else in the universe exists in the form it exists in currently, and that's just natural selection. Right. The very first things to be considered alive, uh, or close to it, were called protocells. Okay? And protocells basically were just bubbles of lipids, right? Like fats and um, proteins, enzymes that just happened to form and encapsulate, uh, certain chemicals in the right way to cause them to react in a semblance of a self-sufficient cycle. It sounds crazy to think about, but honestly it was just circumstance, happenstance, randomness. Randomness that was destined to occur at some point just because of the inevitability of quantum fluctuations. But inevitably, a bubble, a lipid bubble captured all of the necessary elements in the primordial soup in order to start the most crazy fucking thing ever. It didn't immediately pop. Whereas every other bubble was destined to pop immediately, Uh, eventually a lipid bubble form that did not pop. It was the perfect condition and captured the perfect of chemicals inside to maintain a equilibrium, uh, a homeostasis of sorts, right to where it could sustain itself and not pop. But not only did it form that homeostasis, because it was able to survive longer than every other bubble before it, it was able to have things occur inside of that bubble, this environment that was perfectly preserved and undisturbed and separated from the outside world, start doing some crazy chemical reactions that have never before been seen on the planet up until that point. Period. Like in chemical reactions that have never ever occurred on the planet in this small bubble, just because it was able to not pop. Right? So this random self-sustaining lipid bubble at this point. Just a bunch of chemicals arranged in a certain way, right? Undergoing their reaction cycle in a membrane, was able to split into two copies of itself. Right. And from there, natural selection does its things, you know, the lipid bubbles that are able to multiply, they, they stick around. The ones that don't have that exact chemical composition, they die out. They pop. You never see them. We've never heard of them. Right. But the ones that stay around, they stick around longer and longer. Again, start doing crazy shit on the inside that's never been seen before. Right? Those chemical elements on the inside start folding onto themselves and interacting with each other, changing each other's functions, and poof, before you know it, we have something called RNA baby. With RNA comes the ability to store information, store the ability, to copy yourself, store the ability to change other proteins, other enzymes to do other things, to maintain this, now what we have, a functioning cell, the first form of life. Created entirely by a cosmic fluke, an inevitable cosmic fluke, but a statistically insignificant one.

 Humans, for all of our great wisdom and meta consciousness has, uh, been around barely a meaningful percentile of the age of the universe. I mean, the universe is from what we know, close to 14 billion years old, okay? And we've been around as humanity maybe, not even half a million. And if you've heard of the cosmic calendar concept. Basically, it's this analogy that was popularized by Carl Sagan. Shout out Carl Sagan, the renowned science communicator and the astronomer to visualize just how absolutely bonkers along the universe has been here compared to humanity. So we took the entire timeline of the universe, you know, 13.8 billion years, right? And let's say you condensed it down into one year in an equivalent, right? All of human history would fit into the equivalent of 30 seconds, and. I love that analogy, but I'm not a calendar person, so that doesn't really sink into me. Right. So I got a couple more analogies just to help visualize that for people who are like me. All right, let's talk geography. If you're a geography person, spatial awareness kind of thing. Okay. That's like the entire history of the earth was the size of the earth and the entire history of humanity was the size of Rhode Island. That's, that's how out of proportion. It's, or I, I know this one's gonna resonate with a lot of people. Wealth disparity. Okay, let's talk money. Okay. We gave both the universe and earth, like a humans on earth, human history. A dollar for every time it's been around every year, right? Okay. So the universe gets $13.8 billion, and you know what all of humanity gets? 5,000. 5,000. Again, $13.8 billion. Humanity 5,000. So you can see just how ridiculously short really we've been around for, right? Compared to all of the history. Okay? Like 2.7 million times older than us. That stupid, silly levels of disproportionate. And from a statistical objective perspective, in the grand scheme of the universe, we're literally nothing. We're a rounding error, not even. Our entire lifetime, ends in dust that's lost to time, and the time that we're alive has no bearing on the inevitable outcome or direction of the cosmos. And it's not just you or me, it's everyone you've ever known. And ever heard of, or will ever hear of, or will ever come after you, is in the same exact boat. We're all just pretending, you know, we're agreeing to pretend otherwise because of the meta conscious brain trained to defend itself against the logical contradictions. We basically needed to survive. We can't comprehend the idea that, oh shit, we really are meaningless. Our meta conscious brain just lies to us and makes us feel like we're any more special than we really are. And other living organisms don't have that problem because they don't have a meta conscious brain that's observing the fact that they're alive. They're just continuing to do those natural chemical processes that natural selection has tuned into them over millions of years in order to survive. Not really understanding or recognizing their place in the grand scheme of things, humans, a little bit different. , think about the amount of media you consume, telling you that you're special, that you can make a difference no matter who you are. Think about how truly false we all know that really is for most people on earth, but how we cling to the idea like it's an unquestionable true fact. That's just how our brain's programmed to survive. Baby. There's 12 times as many people dead right now than there are alive. Okay? You know, alive. 8 billion ish humans. Dead 110 billion. So again, statistically speaking, almost none of them are gonna be remembered by name and you're not gonna be any different. And even if you are, even if you manage to break among the mold, your story is less and less likely to be remembered objectively as time passes. Yeah. But that's the fact. Even if the world remembers you long after you're gone, you have zero control over how that happens. Your story, your image, your name, your likeness, anything could be co-opted, twisted, completely bastardized, or transformed into an unrecognizable form anytime after your death immediately or a thousand years later. And you have no control over that.

To strive so hard, to have a long term impact, to feel any pressure at all to contribute to humanity or society in the long term is realistically just an exercise in ego, not a realistic mindset to strive for. It's just something that society and our brain has tricked ourselves into believing because it feels natural for our survival instinct, but reality is we're nothing. You're nothing. I'm nothing humanity's, nothing. Just specs in a cosmos that doesn't give a fuck about us. But that's not a bad thing. Like at all. I, I wake up and I think that every morning and it's, uh, like a giant weight off my chest. You know why? Because it makes the entirety of my world so, so, so much smaller. That's amazing for me. Right. The world today is bigger than ever for every person. Most of the world can communicate with anyone else in the world close to the speed of light, right? You can access the sum of human knowledge right at your fingertips instantaneously, and it makes your perception of the world wider and bigger and more comprehensive than ever. Double-edged sword, though you're now more aware than ever of things that never had a bearing on you, you know, previously, or your grandparents never, ever had to think about. Right? And it's just being bombarded at you constantly. Every single day. You're more connected in both a good and a bad way. But that's crazy to think about because in reality, you know, real life, your energy, your time, your entire life revolves around your local community and your finite lifespan, and that's really where your time and energy should be focused on, right tangible impacts to your happiness and your family's happiness, your loved one's, happiness in your community, within your lifespan.

You don't owe anything to the world. You don't owe anything to humanity, to your country, to your race, your gender, your species, nothing like that. You only owe what it is that you can perceive in your finite lifetime. Right? And I would say for most people, hopefully everyone listening to that, it's going to be the idea that you can candidly affect your local community, your loved ones around you, your own life, right?

And honestly, humanity is cursed anyways, like we're gonna deep dive in the next couple episodes about why humanity is so cursed and why it is so pointless or hopeless to really fight for a future for humanity in the long term. It's way, way more fruitful to focus on yourself and the things that you can control in the immediate short term. Okay. So who cares if we're nothing, right? That just means that it's a, we're a blank canvas ready to beed upon. I know I said no prose. That was really prose-y. I'm really sorry, but think about it like that, okay? And whereas the world and society wants you to get assigned meaning to you, right? Dictate what it is in life is meaningful for you. I feel like a blank canvas, resetting, acknowledging and understanding that all of that, it really is nothing in the grand scheme of things, allows you to recalibrate and really find what it is meaningful for you. Why are you living? And if you're like me, it's all about that do no harm. Take no shit mentality. Hedonistic nihilism essentially. But from a humanist perspective. Lots of adjectives, lots of labels. That just means love yourself, lovely people around you, and don't stress so much about things that you can't control, even if that thing is the end of humanity. We will take a deep dive into what that may look like and you know, how you can best live your life moving forward, knowing that the dystopia is right around the corner.

But until then, thank you very much for joining me Shadow Envy on episode two of the ShxdowCast. Thank you again for listening and I'll catch you next time. As always, stay observant, shadows, shxdowenby out.