The End.
Nothing lasts forever. It’s a common saying, but I wonder how many of us really sit with this truth or allow it to shape our worldview. When I got my PhD, I had a huge party. One of the friends in attendance was younger than most of us, an undergraduate involved in activism who took political and philosophical questions seriously, and strove to give them their due. Like everyone else, he had a lot to drink that night, and ended up sharing some existential quandaries with us by lamenting how as religious claims were obviously not true, and everything eventually passes away or ends, and the universe itself is expanding and so eventually will be no more as far as we can tell, therefore — and here was the key phrase he kept repeating in despair — everything is dust. And then he threw up in one of the bedrooms. Which is a reminder of why one should generally avoid 1) over-drinking, 2) existential questions which cannot be resolved or do not have a satisfying answer and, especially, 3) ind