A thought experiment on importance

This is less a story and more a loose article. Calling it poetry felt pretentious. This article considers what it means to have value and how we cultivate value in our lives.

Thinking back to a previous essay, or whatever you would call it, I wrote on the spectrum of life and the exponential scale of consciousness. My views require a reflection on the importance of IMPORTANCE. That is to say, primarily the importance of the individual. I am most concerned with the consequence of myself as a person. But if I were to compare myself to the salience of a global leader, such as the president of the United States, I should diminish; my corpus evanescing. Unquestionably, he is vastly more important. His actions will persist through time, his name etched in monuments, flourished across tremulous documents, and peppered among the writings and memories of people the world over. Children commit them to them, and where he stood on the ladder of leaders through time. He will be assessed and scrutinized, praised, cursed, and so many more things than I ever will. With such in mind, it seems natural to self-deprecate.

BUT. The president never gave a friend of mine the money they needed to make ends meet, listened to their troubles, planted the trees near my home, or watered the plants in my garden. They weren't the ones who saved the kitten on my mother's back porch or gave my choking friend the Heimlich. They didn't overcome the trials of being gay in a conservative community, earn my family's respect and help broaden their perspective on what it means to be a liberal or reconsider bipartisanship. He didn't comfort my best friend when her husband vacillated, checking in on her throughout her divorce. He didn't make my ex-wife fall in love with me or out again, for that matter. He didn't teach dozens of students in my classrooms the importance of observation or critical thinking. He can't know the depths of my heart or how I will affect others. He wasn't there when I shut down the bully, or shamed the teacher, or broke a friend's heart. You see, value is not solely only based on the good we do.

Conversely, I could never know the depths or secrets of his heart. I can see his impact visibly. Mine is more discrete. The wake I leave is a convection cell in the ether, moving but invisible. His might be a hurricane, but what does a storm do. It is loud, destructive, and polarizing, pulling people together, and destroys lives and property. It has its subtleties and even small beginnings. They do not concern me unless and until I get caught up in the storm. Neither lacks value.

I return to the idea of my own wake, the ripples I cast into space. A good deed done inspires another, boosts a mood that encourages a person, shifting their paradigm. The infection transposes onto others in turn. Am I responsible for that? Only insomuch as when two ripples collide, it creates a third, sometimes stronger if the wavelengths align properly, sometimes weaker if they share equal opposite force. Regardless, I see that I have power. My actions serve to benefit, harm, and inoculate my ecology. I am important in my place. That importance manifests when I self-actualize. Understanding my strengths and weaknesses, virtues, vices, and passions, and those things that bore or inspire disdain makes me better suited to produce a broader impact. 

I strive to affect or impose those graces upon my circumstances in the most beneficial way. Of course, that assumes you subscribe to the idea, as I do, that we have a responsibility to the knowledge we ascertain; that life has the meaning you give it. It is up to the individual to create our value, not as humans or living things, which I believe have an inherent value as miraculous, whether by accident or design. That is irrelevant. We cultivate meaning as a contributor. We give and take. We participate in some way. At times each of us is benevolent, at others malignant. We are free agents able to create, make, diminish, or destroy. Even passivity bears the burden of echoing through time, creating value. How? I think it is the act of disengaging, choosing not to act, that has the impact of persisting along the same course or even permitting entropy or degeneration. In its way, it creates a sort of value, which may be positive or negative, depending on your relationship to the resulting change or perpetuation.

To clarify, I do not believe we are central figures in Creation and understand these concepts to apply to all things, living or otherwise. Even the dead have purpose. They enrich the soil, nourish bacteria and insects and plants, cycle the industries of funerary services and religion, remind us of the importance of a life well-lived, cause grief, make room for new life, and the list goes on.

I think what we really fear is being less, unimportant, or forgotten. We come to the crux. All things, in their place, are more important than anything else could ever be. Nothing else will ever yield the same results, bear the same effects upon its environment as the individual.

Newness undermines the laws of magnitude. Contrary to popular belief, the butterfly effect, debunked by nearly every experiment I am aware of, is not how the universe thrives. Entropy prohibits any single act from becoming a crux in the ultimate disposition of existence as accounted for in the infinite volume of space. One man might push a button and destroy the world, and the universe cares not. Not until that moment, hundreds of trillions of years into the future, when the last wave of energy ebbs from the last remaining black hole. The stars will roll up like a scroll, and what we did, what anything did, will cease to matter. That insignificance lends significance to each little thing we do. It isn't that we will have some world-shaking impact. It's that we use our lives to the best of our abilities to find satisfaction and happiness. "Worship God, Live your vain lives and die. For all is vanity," as the lamenter said. We can find meaning that, regardless of religious outlook. We live by our principles, after all. We make offerings and sacrifices to what matters to us, to see it come to pass, or persist, or in some cases, for mere vanity's sake. Objectively speaking, it's the ultimate subjectivity and freedom. We get to choose how we will live. You may never be the president, but you construct your identity and are central to your reality. That should never be confused with being central to anyone else's reality. After all, they are responsible for being the most important people in their own lives.

Is that sad? or empty, or void? Is it nihilistic? No. I am trying to state the opposite. Have hope because there will never be another you. You may never live again, leaving ideas about reincarnation or persistent spirituality aside. If that is so, then your footprint is genuinely unique. A fingerprint on time. Will anyone ever notice it in three hundred years? Maybe not. But the tree you planted will shed its nuts. And they will become food for animals, enabling them to live on through another winter, and what remains will grow, carried to other places by time and wind and excrement to become other trees, feeding other things, perpetuating the cycle. The person you held hands with will remember that, and maybe tell a story about it, imprinting ideas of love onto their children, that ingrains itself into their romantic thought life, which leads to sex and babies. Etcetera. You're small and beautiful. You're part of something incredible and infinitely complex. It's okay to acknowledge that we are finite. It's okay for people to forget your name. You will still matter. From largest to least, no one is more insignificant or more important than you. And that is amazing, if not a little romantic.

May I digress a little and become somewhat wistful? I will. Thank you. Even as I write this, I feel caught between two places (a persistent conflict for me). I write to contribute, to be remembered, or to impose change and to give myself meaning. The fear of nothingness spurs me. I lost my faith some time ago. I don't think it is sad, only a little scary. I don't know to define myself anymore. Maybe I don't need to, though I think it is instinctive. I think we carry the need out of a drive to survive. If we are important, then we have the support of those around us. They will help us, be kind to us, revere us, serve us, benefit us, and ultimately, remember us. If we are important, then we persist as notable figures. Thereby we gain the privilege of immortality among our peers. Our spirit may depart, but something remains. I confess, the idea is seductive. But maybe we can find another way to meet this need. Perhaps we can negotiate with our instinct and agree to terms on which our minds and instincts otherwise differ. Might insignificance and profundity coexist: held by the same hand? Even for the apostate, the agnostic, the atheist, and the non-religious, perhaps we can find a way to continue in perpetuity. Is this simply a way to assuage our genetically ingrained anxieties about death? An instrument to mitigate the fear of impending doom? Yes and no. The idea comes from that need. Because, how is it fair to call the necessity for importance only valuable to the famous or religious? That makes no sense. We are all made of the same stuff and have similar needs and desires. We all deserve to understand our place in things. We all want to thrive beyond the now.

That is not to say that I am attempting to create something new or placate fear. I'm not trying to sop up the deluge of perceived inadequacies so typical of the average man. Or maybe, to some extent, I am. I'm looking for ecstasy: removing ourselves from identity to see ourselves clearly as people in a role. All of us need to see how our matter matters: not only to us but existentially, ecologically, spiritually, socially, personally. We may never be in movies. We are unlikely to see monuments raised in our likeness, but our fingerprints are never totally eradicated. Because time is a sequence, a string of events, and no one and nothing can undo what you've done. The everchanging narratives may wreak havoc on your accomplishments, but the truth and its consequences remain. But then, so do the narratives. No one will ever be able to undo the waves you've made. As I've said, even if the waves cancel each other, isn't that a consequence that happened only as an active response to your actions? The results of that conflict will reverberate; a sequence of events, making paths, destroying others, charging forward through time.

Author's Note

I am somewhat concerned about the overall flow and continuity.
I am unsure if the voice I am using works. I know it changes a bit throughout.
Does it read as pretentious?
Most importantly, is it interesting and understandable?!?!?

Reviews

[barleygirl]

Your self-honesty is abundant & refreshing. Your sequence of thoughts is mostly clear, but in places a little hard to follow. I would venture to guess that a piece like this would not be easy for most people to read, becuz of your complexity of thought & expression. For me personally, I find this hard to read becuz it feels like trudging thru a sea of judgment. So much of what you express, you see & explain in terms of good or bad, one thing pitted against another, as if your mind is in turmoil, fighting itself for possession of a coherent philosophical statement. I believe this would be easier for me to take if you could be less judgmental & just express what is felt, what is seen, what is understood, without having to make it right or wrong, better or lesser than anything else. I remember writing to want to be remembered, or understood, or whatever. But there comes a time when we let go of all that judgmental baggage & just write becuz an idea knocks & persists & demands to be expressed. Who cares if it's an essay or a poem or if people would judge you pretentious. If you ask this question in your author's notes, it's a sign to me that maybe on some level you find YOURSELF pretentious. It's this judgment thing. You comparing yourself to everything, as if it's a matter of life or death to have significance. Heaven forbid that we are mere worms crawling thru our nasty little lives & then dying without a shred of importance (((HUGS)))

[willbradley]

That's! I'll go back to the drawing board with it. That's insightful

[barleygirl]

Sorry it seems I'm being hard on you here. Your writing is high-level analytical & interesting. It would sparkle if the comparisons were peeled away & just leaving your interesting & exquisite way of perceiving things.

[Audrey Rose]

I love your prose and your distinct voice. Does it read as pretentious? Possibly, but what would be bad about it? Why not?
Reading it, its anger and frustration reminded me of a book by Philip Roth, the avalanche of imagery, its violence.
The point comes across but at times hard to follow, I would blame this on my neurodivergent brain though.
Good writing, unmistakably