You shouldn’t exist

There are moments when your experience of the world changes in a fundamental way. Like looking up at the night sky and realizing how big everything is – and how small you are. In those moments, everything has perspective. Not only do problems seem to matter less, your experience of your surroundings has this surreal character, as if everything is more three-dimensional and the colors are much more intense. Your consciousness feels bigger than your body, which is suddenly “just” another sensation. And there’s awe, lots of awe.

Looking at the night sky, or being in nature, seeing massive mountains and imagining how much time they took to form – or imagining you're going to die very soon, like in a year or less – many things can trigger such an experience.

But there is one particular thought that evokes this experience most strongly, and that makes me happy unlike anything else:

I shouldn’t even be here!

How improbable is it that you’re here to begin with? And to be able to witness life as a conscious being, aware not only of beauty but of your own existence within it? For you to be conscious and to experience this, to be able to think those very thoughts!

It’s layers upon layers of improbability: your parents meeting at that precise moment in history, and then their parents before them. Thousands of ancestors, each making a choice that inevitably led to you. Our human species evolving over millions of years, surviving catastrophes that nearly wiped us out multiple times. Life itself emerging from inanimate elements and chemical reactions on early Earth. The Earth forming at just the right distance from the Sun to be habitable. And beyond that, a universe with physical constraints precisely tuned to permit atoms, stars, and the complexity of life. Yet here you are.

And you don’t just exist. You’re conscious of this world of stars, snowy mountains, and insane chemical reactions like photosynthesis. And the closer you look, the more you realize that it’s not just stacked layers of improbability that led to this very moment, it’s also stacked layers of beauty hidden in complexity.

It doesn’t stop with nature. Sometimes, I stand on a bridge and admire the railroad tracks below. Strange as it may sound, I marvel at how straight they are. At the human ingenuity that invented the technology to mine iron, process it, and then cast it into rails. And to arrange them to form a perfect line to the horizon. It makes me optimistic about our future – it’s like the rails are screaming at me: “Humans can do anything if we put our minds to it!”

Sometimes people claim that science and technology destroy the beauty of nature and existence by dissecting it, by cutting it into tiny pieces. Suddenly, a flash of lightning isn’t Magic anymore, it’s “just electricity”.

But I think it’s actually the opposite. “Just electricity” is such a complex phenomenon. Learning how many things have to happen for lightning to strike fills me with greater awe than “magic”. It’s like looking closely at a speck of dust and realizing that some of them are actually intricate works of art.

All those thoughts create this warm fuzzy feeling of cosmic awe. But these realizations are as fleeting as water running between your fingers. One moment you’re in awe, and the next you're in “get groceries, answer emails, be a person” mode. Somehow I am the product of an eternity of accidents and get mad when I miss my train.

I realize why it’s so easy to forget this – after all, a species that experienced nothing but awe would never have hunted for food or fled from predators, and would soon die out. But it’s also tragic because these thoughts can ease so much psychological suffering. Most things that bother you don’t matter in a year or so. That rejection at work? Losing your wallet? Missing the train? They suck! But it’s pretty damn unlikely to be alive in the first place. If losing my wallet is the price, I’m very happy to pay it!

All of this, the stars, the mountains, and the straight rails, none of it owes you anything. And yet, against all odds, you are here.

You shouldn’t exist. But now that you are, look around. Stay a while.