We Are Born Alone
0
Loneliness has layers.
Eating alone.
Watching a movie alone.
Traveling alone.
You see a magnificent landscape. You capture a decisive moment — the sunlight and the child’s smile both perfectly aligned. You stare at the camera screen again and again, unable to look away. You don’t know who to send it to.
But none of that really matters.
1
Whale calls range between 10~40Hz. They have their own language, their own clans. They even whisper behind each other’s backs. Whales, in short, are remarkably intelligent creatures.
In 1989, American scientists detected the voice of a whale they named Alice. Her call registered at 52Hz. They tracked her for twelve years and found that in all that time, not a single other whale ever responded to her.
Her voice was too high for other whales to hear.
2
A plesiosaur survived by accident. It had slept in the abyss for an unknowable span of time, and finally woke into the modern world. Its kind had long been extinct. The Earth was no longer the Earth it knew. Primates ruled the land. They had invented ships and built countless harbors, and around those harbors, countless lighthouses.
The plesiosaur was drawn to the foghorn of a lighthouse — a sound remarkably like one of its old companions. The lighthouse sounded its horn at regular intervals, and the plesiosaur called back from the deep, overjoyed to have found a friend. Again and again it surfaced, but received no answer. It grew furious, then anguished, convinced it must have given some offense for its companion to ignore it so completely.
Finally, in a moment of painful clarity, it understood the truth. It destroyed the lighthouse, sank into the abyss, and never returned.
3
Humans are ephemeral.
A human life spans mere decades. Birth, aging, illness, death — a curse no one escapes.
But perhaps being ephemeral is a mercy. Imagine you were granted immortality. You were born the same day as history itself. You witnessed the building of the pyramids, the beacon fires lit to fool the warlords, the enlightenment beneath the Bodhi tree, the crucifixion, the Prophet’s Night Journey. You witnessed the conquest of Jerusalem and the fall of Constantinople, the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, two World Wars, the detonation of nuclear bombs…
And then you go on living.
You have experienced everything, but no one can understand you.
You cry out to the entire universe and receive no answer.
4
Of all the frameworks for understanding death, my favorite is Mexico’s Day of the Dead.
After you die, you go to another world. You are dead, yes, but the living still remember you. They think of you, miss you, tell you what’s happening in the world of the living, and burn you a paper iPhone 20.
As long as someone remembers you, you remain vivid. When the last person forgets you, you cease to exist entirely.
An elegant patch for the overcrowded-heaven bug.
5
What is consciousness? Does the soul exist?
I like to think that every thought we have sends a ripple through the universe — faint, perhaps, but real. Those who pay attention can hear it.
The world is the superposition of every consciousness’s ripples.
All so-called “value” in human society, traced to its root, exists entirely within consciousness.
When the body dies and consciousness leaves its host, it can no longer generate new ripples.
But the ripples already made persist. They continue spreading through the universe, layer upon layer, superimposing upon one another.
I think that at this stage, one can still receive newly generated ripples.
Eventually, the old ripples fade and dissolve into the void.
6
I have always been struck by the story of the Tower of Babel.
In the Old Testament, all of humanity once spoke a single language. One day they decided to build a tower that would reach heaven. God saw this, confounded their speech so they could no longer understand one another, and scattered them across the earth. Humanity never again had the capacity to build such a tower.
One day it occurred to me that the Tower of Babel is, in fact, a great metaphor.
We now have Google Translate, every variety of machine learning, NLP technology — language is no longer a barrier. Yet humanity busies itself with conquest and deception, still incapable of building that tower.
Was language ever really the obstacle? Clearly not.
We communicate through language. What we say is not entirely what we think, and what others hear is not entirely what we said. Layer upon layer of loss, the signal distorted — this is how misunderstanding and deception arise. You can never be one hundred percent understood.
You are always alone.
7
“I have visited a planet where a red-faced gentleman lives. He has never smelled a flower. He has never looked at a star. He has never loved anyone. He has never done anything except add up figures. And all day long he says over and over: ‘I am busy with matters of consequence! I am a serious person!’ And that makes him swell up with pride. He is not a man at all — he is a mushroom.”
“A what?”
“A mushroom!“
8
We all know the universe is built from fundamental particles — atoms, electrons, and so on.
You often marvel at how someone as beautiful as Aragaki Yui could exist, and imagine that God must have taken special care in creating her.
But Aragaki Yui and your female colleague across the desk are made of exactly the same particles. Viewed this way, there is no difference between them.
However different they may seem, the electrons composing them are identical.
Which led some idle physicists to propose the “one-electron universe” hypothesis:
The entire universe contains only a single electron. It races along the axis of time, appearing in every corner of space, so that it looks as if there are countless identical electrons. Tireless, it created the universe, the Milky Way, the solar system, the Earth. It constitutes all matter on Earth. It constitutes every human being — men and women, every race, the tall, the short, the fat, the thin, the flat-chested and the well-endowed.
Everything that has ever happened in the universe is this one electron’s solo performance. You wept bitterly when the girl from the class next door rejected you, but you and she were the same electron all along. You are her; she is you. You rejected yourself.
We exist inside this system. We cannot step outside it to observe ourselves. The one-electron universe hypothesis is therefore unfalsifiable — just as you can never prove you are not a brain in a vat, wired to electrodes and floating in nutrient fluid.
I have no desire to falsify this theory. I only want to say: that electron must be so goddamn lonely.
Andy Weir’s short story The Egg strikes the same chord.
A man dies and learns he is about to be reincarnated as a Chinese peasant girl in 540 AD.
Yes, reincarnation into the past. Time is meaningless.
He will repeat this cycle countless times. Every person who has ever existed on Earth is a past or future life of his.
You are me. I am you.
9
Let me end with a romantic theory.
Light travels along the shortest path. But light has no brain — how does it know which path is shortest?
Light travels every possible path. To reach you, it traverses every conceivable route. The so-called shortest path is the superposition of waves from all those routes — countless ripples converging into the strongest resonance. That is the shortest path.
It traversed the entire universe, just to reach you.
2019-04-15 @Delhi