You're the right kind of sinner

Someone on my F-list asked this morning: Is life really a fight against inertia? A never-ending war against despair caused by loss and entropy?

I have some strong (although perhaps heartless) feelings about this issue, so I responded:

Yes (well, mostly--it will end, eventually). But you make that sound like a bad thing.

mckitterick and I--although mostly mckitterick just drags me along for the ride--have frequent and unresolvable conversations about the meaning of life. He's trying to find one, and I don't believe one exists. I am firmly of the opinion that nothing happens for a reason other than the motivations and purposes we attach to our own actions. Bad things and good things don't happen "for a reason" (whether that reason is a lesson, or justice, or any number of fabricated notions of morality and ethics that make us feel like the universe actually cares about us, which it totally does not). They just happen because they do.

I take the concept "Shit Happens" to a cosmological level.

We did not evolve for a purpose. There is no Grand Plan of Evolution with the goal of achieving some amazingly advanced species. Life happens because that is its nature (pardon the mild pun). Life will fight to exist, despite the overwhelming power of entropy that will eventually result in the heat death of the universe.

No doubt about it, we will lose this war. But that knowledge doesn't mean the fight has to be boring. In fact, if you want to get all mystical and shit about it, you could say that it's a good thing to give the heartless universe a big old Fuck You by creating happiness and beauty for ourselves and those around us. Before we snuff it. Which we will.

And the universe still won't care. And that's okay. That's life.

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