Nothing Matters

I can’t take a compliment to save my life. Someone says something nice about me, I visibly squirm, like a fallen baby bird chafing at the kind hands attempting to put me back in the nest. If I’m being honest, compliments are minefields. They feel disingenuous when directed at me, or I believe they hold ulterior motives by the speaker. What do they really want from me? I think. My brain tries to rationalize the comments, wondering if those kind words are because the statement is true or someone is just trying to be nice.

It’s a kindness. Not a truth. These compliments, whether it’s directed at my looks or in how I interact with other people, are subjective at best, absolutely false at worst (well, not worst…my argument is that who cares?). Objectively, I’m nothing. I matter little. My life bears little to almost no consequence for this world, and no one will remember me a few years past my death. This feels like a core truth of mine, something that informs who I am and how I show up in this world.

I have always been able to drop and pick up friendships fairly easily. Everything is in context to space and time, and close friendships are simply because we share physical space, living in proximity to friends and in our current time (yes, the internet does change this, with the ability to chat over video…but I am not built to do that often…I even abhor talking on the phone). We would not have met had these conditions not been present, and the conversations we have would have been had with someone else. Enough friendships and relationships have metamorphasized over my lifetime to know that nothing lasts. I recently picked up something that feels like it will become another core truth of mine: that with each person we meet, there is already the beginning of heartbreak in that initial meeting. Now, heartbreak may be a strong word but, for someone that does connect deeply and quickly with the people in her life, it’s not too far from how I feel. With each meeting, there is already the seed of loss. It will happen either through the natural shedding of friendships and loves as we grow apart or through a lifetime of shared love and connection that ends in death.

There is nothing unique about me. Middle-aged, a little tall, a kind heart, a fairly blasé feeling about the contents of my soul. There’s at least a million other people that can do what I can do, can be friends with a wide range of humans and personalities, write code like me, imperfectly manage a team, horribly fuck up on project deadlines and speak insensitive words and are plagued with sad, clawing neediness. Talk to any of my doppelgängers and you’ll see our shared truths.

This sounds like it should be a sad thing. Feels like I should be pitied for feeling this way, doesn’t it?

Let me say this, though: since I matter for nothing, I am liberated. If nothing matters, if I don’t matter, all I have left is the wide open expanse of possibility. I’ve been told it sounds like I’m a nihilist. If nothing matters, what’s the point? Why bother with anything? Live your life in hedonism, taking and taking, giving nothing back, so goes the argument. I wrestle with the argument being made. If I don’t matter, and nothing we do matters, why bother with life at all?

Give me some space. Let me reason through this.

I don’t matter. A truth. What I do doesn’t matter. Another truth.

But…however, since those truths are true, inasmuch a truth can be had by one so myopic as me, my second point is that what we do between each other, on the individual level, does matter. Holy hell, it is the only thing that matters. Everything matters when we zoom into what happens between me and you. I think the sense is that I try not to hold on to the interactions, let loose the compliments, dismiss the words about my looks and kindness and capacity to connect viscerally with humans because it’s all just bullshit anyway. Things change, looks change, behaviors morph, time marches on, which just speeds up, on and on, until I’m in the ground. Nothing I do matters to anyone in particular, but everything I do matters immensely to those who choose to allow me to be part of their lives.

This still feels like an incomplete thought. Maybe sounds negative and sad. To me it is anything but. It is the most freeing thought I’ve thought in a while.