The Unbearable Weight of Being

"We are the universe's attempt to know itself, and we are also the universe's decision to forget itself."

The Universe's Mistake

I was eight years old the night I had my first panic attack. Heart pounding in the darkness, I lay awake contemplating what my Sunday school teachers had promised: when we die, we go to heaven and live... forever. The word echoed in my mind like a prison sentence. I didn't want to live forever. The idea of consciousness continuing endlessly, of never being allowed to simply not be, felt more terrifying than death itself. When I asked about my dog, they said animals don't go to heaven. That's when I knew the whole system was fucked up.

This is consciousness discovering its own impossible trap: we are matter that became aware of itself, only to find ourselves caught between two unbearable infinities—the terror of ending and the horror of never being allowed to end. Death frightens us, but so does the prospect of eternal awareness. We created religions and myths to escape one terror, only to discover we've created another.

Every other species, as far as we know, lives and dies without the psychological torture of anticipating their own end. They don't lie awake calculating the years they have left, or feel crushing guilt over suffering they cannot prevent. They don't stare into the void and have the void stare back. But we do. We developed the "gift" of consciousness and immediately began perfecting ways to escape it.

We've organized our entire civilization around not thinking. Sports, entertainment, recreational eating, drinking, drugs, careers, social media—every human institution seems designed to provide what we desperately crave: temporary unconsciousness. We pay billions to enter darkened theaters or sit before screens at home where we lose ourselves in other people's stories. We work jobs that demand such complete attention they leave no space for existential reflection.

Even sex. The French call orgasm "la petite mort"—the little death. Perhaps they understood something profound. We chase that moment of obliteration, that brief escape from the burden of selfhood, even as the very act creates more conscious beings to inherit our impossible situation. Evolution made pleasure so overwhelming that we'd pursue it against all logic, constantly seeking that temporary dissolution while simultaneously extending the experiment of consciousness into new bodies.

And now, as we enter planetary hospice, as society winds down, and as the chaos speeds up, many (most?) surrender our critical thinking to authority figures who promise to handle the complexity for us: "No need to think; we've got you covered. Just wave our flag and leave it up to us."

This isn't weakness or moral failure. This is consciousness trapped between the unbearable lightness of being—the meaninglessness that threatens to dissolve us, and the unbearable weight of being—the responsibility and suffering that threatens to crush us. Fascist movements thrive by offering the same comfort as entertainment and drugs: the blessed relief of not having to think, not having to choose, not having to be fully conscious.

Ignorance truly is bliss, and consciousness systematically works to return to that blissful state by any means necessary. We've all said it, we've all felt it: "Just let me sleep."

The Empathy Trap

The cruelest joke may be that consciousness didn't just make us aware of our own mortality—it made us capable of recognizing suffering in other beings. Every act of genuine empathy opens us to infinite pain. Watch the hands that tenderly stroke a beloved dog as she dies, whispering comfort, weeping at the loss of a cherished family member. These same hands will later slice into the flesh of an equally loving and feeling pig without psychological conflict, consuming her body as fuel for another day, or as entertainment at a baseball game.

This isn't necessarily hypocrisy—it's psychological survival. What would full empathy actually mean? Feeling the terror of every animal in every slaughterhouse as acutely as your own fear. The suffocation of every fish pulled from poisoned oceans. The panic of every climate refugee. The desperation of every parent watching their child starve. The loneliness of every creature trapped in industrial systems of mechanized suffering. As a vegan, I feel it. Good fucking god, I feel it. But even I have to look away to survive.

Most people, when they catch glimpses of this full awareness, immediately retreat. They choose compartmentalization because the alternative—feeling everything—would be psychologically catastrophic. We developed sophisticated mechanisms to love and destroy simultaneously, to care deeply while participating in systems that cause immense harm.

We became the first species cursed with moral imagination, capable of envisioning better worlds we seem powerless to create.

Species-Level Suicide

Perhaps this explains why we accelerate toward our own destruction despite having all the knowledge and technology needed to prevent it. Climate change isn't policy failure—it's consciousness working to eliminate itself.

We understand feedback loops, tipping points, the mathematical certainty of civilizational collapse and of probable extinction as we continue current trajectories. We have renewable energy technology. We know what needs to be done. Yet we elect leaders who deny reality, structure economies around endless growth on a finite planet, and accelerate consumption even as the biosphere unravels. And most of us consume more than we need, more than can ever be sustained by our fragile home.

The same intellectual capacity that allowed us to understand our predicament provided us with tools for our destruction. We split the atom and immediately built weapons capable of sterilizing Earth. We've built our own cosmic suicide button—nuclear weapons whose only purpose is to end everything—and call their existence rational security policy. A "get out of jail free card" in our back pocket.

Fearing that surety of death while unconsciously wishing for it, we keep our weapons of mass destruction in their tenuous holsters while we ensure a slower but just as real threat to our, to everyone's, existence. We developed global agriculture and immediately began poisoning the soil and water we depend on. We unleashed industry to slowly but steadily heat our only home to unlivable conditions. We seem to find comfort in consuming ourselves into oblivion. The pace accelerates exponentially.

Collective suicide relies upon collective compliance. To guarantee submission, to ensure escape is impossible, we've nailed shut all the doors and windows of our minds from the outside. We've created communication networks and used them to spread misinformation and tribal hatred. Each technological advance increases our capacity for both distraction and destruction. Social media fragments our attention while climate feedback loops trigger ahead of scientific predictions, fanning the flames on our engulfed, doomed little school bus headed over a cliff of our own making, pedal to the metal. Even our entertainment has perfected the art of temporary death, numbing us to what's coming—real death, permanent nothingness. We consume information and substances not for their positive effects but for their ability to dim consciousness, to make us temporarily less aware of our condition.

The Sacred Paradox

Here's what makes this more than just nihilistic despair: some of us continue the work of consciousness even as consciousness works to destroy itself. We practice kindness toward animals still trapped in systems of torture. We create beauty while beauty can still be perceived. We offer comfort to children who may witness the end of everything. We escape the confines of our entrapped minds and hearts and imagine better ways of being. We love fiercely in the face of apparent meaninglessness.

These acts won't save us. They won't change the outcome or slow the spiral. But they represent something unprecedented in cosmic history: matter that became aware of itself, recognized the weight of existence, and chose love anyway.

There is something almost absurd about choosing kindness while the world burns, continuing to plant gardens while the soil dies, loving deeply while everything ends. But perhaps the absurdity is what makes it sacred. Perhaps this is consciousness's greatest achievement—not the solving of its impossible situation, but the decision to respond with love despite the futility.

We cannot save consciousness from its own contradictions. But we can honor what it achieved: the impossible act of matter caring about matter, awareness choosing compassion over oblivion, the universe briefly, brilliantly, tragically awake to itself.

The universe accidentally evolved matter capable of recognizing its own existence, and the first thing this conscious matter discovered was that existence... sucks. And now, collectively, the most highly evolved consciousness, perhaps in the entire universe, seems to be saying, “Just let me go back to sleep.”

We are the universe's attempt to know itself, and we are also the universe's decision to forget itself. In whatever time remains, we are both the question and the answer, both the consciousness that emerged from the void and the consciousness choosing to return to it. The struggle toward love may be all that ultimately matters.

The call of the void grows stronger. The acceleration continues. The futility of it all becomes more obvious. And still love, somehow, tries to find space to live. For now. If we let it.