I think this is where a lot of speculative fiction completely loses me You start with genuinely fascinating ideas like the incomprehensible scale of the universe, the absurdity of existence, infinite possibility, systems too vast for any one person to understand. Ive been looking into Borges, Kafka, House of Leaves, the Library of Babel, great. I love all of that But then these postmodern writers think they're being really fucking clever and arrive at the gayest possible conclusion; “And therefore humanity should give up.” "Oh bing bong bing bong space is too big. Exploration is hubris. Progress is naive. Building things is pointless. The universe doesn't care about us, therefore apparently neither should we. Oh no an empty endless corridor without context its so liminal I'M LOSING MY HECKING MIND! SAVE ME SCIENCE!" What an unbelievably miserable failure of imagination. Human beings confront the infinite, absurd, incomprehensible and meaningless every single day. Just comprehend it bro. Go outside and look at the night sky. More stars that we will ever explore in our collective lifetimes. We do not immediately curl into a ball because reality failed to provide us with a fucking quest marker and yellow paint The Library of Babel isn't horrifying because somewhere among its infinite books you might never stumble across the one volume that explains your life You're not supposed to find that book you dumb fuck you're supposed to write it Meaning is what finite beings create from infinite possibility. That's the entire trick. Thats why we are here The universe does not owe you a prewritten purpose any more than the Library of Babel owes you a convenient shelf containing “THE OBJECTIVE MEANING OF YOUR EXISTENCE, VOL. I.” What an unsatisfying climax If your response to infinite possibility is “but which one am I supposed to choose?” then you don't have an intellectual existential crisis, you have open-worldslop consoomer gamer brain You're standing in reality waiting for the wolverine stink trail to tell you where to go Life has no quest marker. Pick a direction. Build something. Name something. Love someone. Cross an ocean. Go to space. Sit outside and eat a banana. Take a tiny piece of the chaos of creation and say "this has meaning to me" The fact that the universe is indifferent to what we do isn't an argument against doing anything. It is the reason what we choose to do belongs to us in the first place I love fiction about people confronting things beyond their comprehension, but I become considerably less impressed when the profound revelation at the end is basically; “Oh my reddit! Everything is really big and complicated. We should probably stop trying. I am 14 and this is deep.” Fuck off