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) indulging in both at the same time. 

We’ve often joked about that night. And when it comes to questions about the nature of existence, he’s still passionately and sincerely thinking away, and occasionally we compare notes. But he’s come to think it is not all dust — that there is something eternal out there — whereas I remain a pretty hard core materialist. 

Which isn’t to say that I know that all material can’t be eternal. But insofar as we’re talking about things that could have some meaning to me, from my own life to the life of the stars in the universe, it’s clear they are all going to end. And that’s ok. 

It’s that last part, it seems to me, that so many people get hung up on. We have an instinct to resist the idea that everything ends, especially our selves. Hence the need for afterlives, past lives, or various fantasies of a brain in a vat. Of course this makes sense. Death sucks balls and I’m not here to argue otherwise. 

But at the same time, an end is absolutely necessary for anything to have meaning — and that includes life. This obviously has been explored a million times in a hundred different ways, but it bears repeating. How can you imagine a good life if it went on forever? If you had no biological end point, how could decisions, moments, loves, and losses not eventually merge into one ill-defined, and barely registered, mass of experience? Indeed, how could you even have experiences when in a fundamental sense, nothing would ever be at stake? 

I think about this particularly often in terms of relationships. Too often, we consider romantic relationships that end to be failed ones. Yet whether it lasts forever is hardly the measure of the value of a relationship. I broke up with my first graduate school boyfriend after four years of dating, and the heartbreak was real and intense. And yet I had grown so much in that relationship, and learned so much, that it remains of immense value to me. It was in no sense failed. It did exactly, in retrospect, what I needed it to do. 

The same experience, applied to all of life, seems to me the best reflection possible for battling depression. Every pet owner knows we will almost certainly outlive our pets. But we also know that our pets love us, and when they curl up on our lap and ask to be given affection, and we stroke their backs or scratch their ears, that they are happy. They are happy, they feel loved and they love you in return. Again a cliche comes to mind — better to have loved and lost than never loved at all. Isn’t this indisputably true? Because even though one day you will mourn your animal companion, that won’t change that they once felt safe and loved in your arms. The experience is none the less real for not being eternal. Beauty, love, joy, life, the planet, the stars — none of them lose their meaning simply because they pass. Again, what meaning could they have if they never did?