Bears, bread factories, and the impossibility of not being
The very idea of anything presupposes everything. Yes, everything. Which means nothing, true absolute nothing, does not and cannot exist. I'd say "by its very nature," but it has no nature. It's nothing, after all. Absolutely, utterly non-existent. A non-thing. The one and only complete delusion.
This hit me hard during a brutal depressive episode. Cursing God, the designer, the alien overlord, the gamer. Whoever the hell is running this circus. I couldn't take it. Still can't. Not just the state of the world, but existence itself. The whole warped, dazzling mess. How can a love so deep for life and the living be so violently at odds with reality? The chaos. The contradictions. The constant low-grade hum of existential dread.
I'll be blunt. I think existence is a goddamned nightmare. That's the nice version. I don't walk around trembling over it. No energy left for that. Thankfully the depression only hits when I'm at home, which is a mere 99% of the time. Can't find peace there, no matter where I crash. I always want to be somewhere else. Anywhere else. A thousand places at once. If I'm not home, at least I'm somewhere I haven't bled out in yet. Novelty is my lifeblood.
Stagnation kills me. I need stimulation and I'm never getting enough. You know how expensive stimulation is? Of course you do. We live in the same economic sinkhole. Nature's the only cheap fix, and I'm afraid of bears.
Still, I appreciate that bears exist somewhere. Far away from my well-fed flesh. Ever fantasize about fighting off a bear? Fuck yes you have. Everyone does. But you still go on that hike because you don't really believe you'll run into one. That's faith. Me? I've already named the bear that will be the end of me. Frank. I know the protocol. Stay calm, posture, make yourself boring. I'd forget all of it instantly. I'd blow a bear horn in my own ear and shit myself before Frank even broke stride.
Why am I talking about bears. Fear, bravery, and wanting to hang out with trees. Trees are cheap. Books are cheap. Library late fees are manageable. But everything else costs blood. Even the free stuff wants something in return. Hell, even sex. The thing that got us all here. That sacred act of euphoric connection has killed people. Still does. In some places, in some ways. The only memorable sex I've ever had outdoors was in the parking lot of a Franz bread factory, drunk at 3 am. Scientifically un-frownable.
Existence is at war with itself. But also, somehow, in perfect harmony. It's the most insane, gorgeous, unsolvable thing. A paradox machine. It's God. Or not. Or code. Or all of us playing games inside ourselves. Nobody has the answer, and I've stopped being impressed by people who act like they do.
We're alive. Really let that take hold. You. Me. Alive. In this. Whatever this is. What does that even mean?
How does anything exist? Why isn't it just nothing?
Because nobody has ever managed to describe nothing. Not once, not anywhere. Try it. Take a thing and start removing properties. No matter, fine. No energy, fine. No space for the matter and energy to not be in, sure. No time for the space to not last through. Keep going. Every time you think you've got it, you check your hands and you're still holding a something with the labels scraped off. Nothing is the one word we all use fluently and nobody can cash.
Someone will say fine, but you can hold contradictions in your head too. A square circle. You can think about that and it still can't exist, so who cares what a person can think about.
You can't think about it. That's the trick. Try to hold a square circle and your mind hands you a square, or a circle, or static. The concept never forms. What you have is two words standing on each other's shoulders in a coat, and English let them through the door because English lets anything through the door. That isn't conceiving the impossible. That's conception failing while the grammar keeps walking.
Which is exactly what nothing is. Not a thing that failed to exist. A noun-shaped hole we mistook for a name, because you can put it in a sentence.
And then it gets worse, because if you do grant it as a real option, it eats itself.
For something to come from nothing, nothing would have to hold the possibility of something. It would need the capacity. Some rule, some potential, some way that a next thing could follow. And a possibility is a something. A rule is a something. The moment there is a could anywhere in the picture, you are not standing in nothing. You are standing in a place with at least one property, and that place has a name, and the name isn't nothing.
There was never a starting line. No blank page that got written on.
The bare possibility of anything at all means we were never working from nothing in the first place, which means nothing has not once, at any point, been on the table.
The physicists don't rescue it either. When they say the universe came from nothing they mean a quantum vacuum, which has fields and laws and a tendency to fluctuate. That is not nothing. That is a very quiet something with a lot going on.
Which is why the thought ruined my week instead of entertaining me for an afternoon.
When you're in the pit, the thing you reach for isn't death exactly. It's the idea of not-being. A door marked exit, and you're not walking through it, you just need to know the building has one. That's the comfort. That's what you're holding.
And it isn't there. Not sealed, not guarded. Never built. There is no coherent version of the thing you were reaching for, and there never was, and the absence of an exit is not an argument you can win your way out of. Something is. Always. That is either the most reassuring sentence in the language or the most unbearable one, and I have never once been able to decide which, and I've had a lot of time to think about it.
We're not built to hold this. But thanks to consciousness, we try. I'm writing. You're reading. We're clawing at the edges of something immense and unspeakable together.
It's horrifying. It's hilarious. It's something.