The Buddhist: Meaninglessness & Its Meaning*

This is a slightly modified version of a blog originally written on July 26th, 2008.

I was lying in bed late one night, trying to wrap my brain around the meaning of existence, when I was confronted with the enormity of the universe. Its vastness in both time and space is truly incomprehensible to the human mind, but that didn't stop me from trying to understand it.
Let's put down our burgers and remotes and think about this for a second. One hundred years ago, our use of electricity was still in its infancy and Ford had only been making cars for about five years. Go back one thousand years (a period of time already hard to grasp), and the Roman Empire had been dead for over five hundred years and it'd be nearly another five hundred until Columbus "discovers" the Americas. Ten thousand years ago, there was not a written word to be found on the face of the planet. Jump back four to eight million years and you get our ancestral line breaking off from our nearest relatives, the chimps and bonobos.
Fewer than ten million years into the past and *poof* any sign of man is gone. Go back sixty-five million years and you'll see the end of the dinosaurs. About four billions years in the past, and you'll get the beginnings of life on this planet. Another five hundred million years or so will get you the formation of the Earth, and even that is only in the most recent third of the universe's estimated 13.73 billion years of existence.
13.73 billion years. In an industrialized nation such as the US, your average individual is going to have a life span of approximately seventy-five years. How could anything we do in 75 measly little years matter, compared to 13.73 billion? The answer is simple: it doesn't. Nothing you or I do will matter in the grand scheme of things. We could destroy this entire planet and the universe wouldn't even notice.
Some people may find this depressing. I find it comforting. First of all, this knowledge assures me that, no matter how badly I screw up, in the end, none of my mistakes will be that important. Second, it means that we have to create our own meaning.
We all experience life in different ways. Two people can take part in the same event and have two completely different experiences (think of the fans rooting for opposite teams at a football game). The only difference is their perception of what occurred, and this is influenced by the unique experiences each individual had when growing up, how and where they were raised, etc. In a certain sense, all we are is a jumble of mobile associations, associations that form through the interaction of genetics and environment, and are expressed through personality and behavior. We can take some measure of control over our lives by recognizing these associations and attempting to alter them when they are faulty. Instead of thinking, "I failed, therefore I suck," try "I failed, therefore I suck at this (at least for now)."
We're all dying. There's no escape. The only way to reach any measure of immortality is to affect the people around you in such a way that they remember you when you're gone. (Unless you believe in an afterlife, in which case you'll be hangin' with His Holiness for eternity. Hopefully.) This kind of immortality is achieved through acts both good and bad (think Gandhi vs. Hitler).
So what do you want to be remembered for? Money? Fame? Power? Personally, I'd like to be remembered the way I remember my Grandma: as someone who, though flawed, did her best to end up a better person than she was when she started, and who tried to help others achieve the same goal. I don't need the entire world (or any of it, really) to remember me, but it'd provide a small measure of comfort on my deathbed to know that I made those close to me just a tiny bit better.
We are all flawed. The trick is to not only recognize this truth (and accept it), but to see it as a starting point for growth.

*Thanks to Wiki for allowing me to double check some of the specifics of this blog. They're probably wrong, but it's easier than hunting through mounds of textbooks.