This summer I went on vacation with my family to New Hampshire. When I was young we would always come up here. My parents would rent a cabin on a lake, just a ways away from where my aunt and uncle own a small dairy farm. My family hasn’t been to this lake in seven years, not since before I went to college, which I’ve since graduated from. But it’s completely unchanged. The smell, the paint, even the arrangement of furniture. The floorboards creak the same and the bean bag sags like it’s been holding its shape for nearly a decade. Just waiting for us to return.

The Forest and The Trees

A lot of my life feels like a contradiction. Like I’m always caught running between two extremes. I can be really overconfident; full of myself. And I can be radically unsure; insecure. I’ll travel between these states every other second.

Sometimes I feel; very intensely. And sometimes I am unconquerably numb. 

For whatever reason my brain doesn’t seem to process the world right, at least some of the time. It’s like fading away from the universe or letting go of any delineation between myself and everything else, and I don’t have any control over when this happens. 

But emotion, and simply being conscious, is a physical experience for me. I find my body moves on its own when I’m overpowered by a feeling. I find this strange, because I can feel so disconnected from myself sometimes. But even when I’m no longer holding on to the world, I’ll still experience my indeterminacy through my chest or with my hands.

And when I feel excited it’s like my body is vibrating between different dimensions of space. When I’m angry it is as if fire swirls around my lungs, and I feel compelled to lean forward and breathe it out through my nostrils

Love feels like the memory of a kiss against my neck, lightly ticklish and warm. 

Sadness starts at the bridge of my nose, or the edge of my eyes, and travels downwards into my shoulders. Pushing me into the ground. Sometimes it feels like a weight inside my heart, and I worry I won’t be able to keep my blood pumping.

To live is to engage in this joyous, sorrowful, heartbroken, and thrilling experience. It’s intoxicating and sometimes I can’t stand it. It’s an ever shifting combination of these sensations. Often they harmonize and occasionally they feel like they might rip me apart.

I think there’s something lovely about being alive.

It’s hard to capture with words just what it’s like to experience the world. I wish I could use language to make you feel the cold breeze that comes after a storm. I wish I could make you see the way clouds darken the afternoon, and trees explode with verdance following the rain. How seeing all of this just makes me want to move. To sway and soak up whatever current moment I find myself in.

But I can only gesture at these feelings. Motion at the raw and delightful experience that comes with just being outside.

Despite how loose I can be with my language, I am well known for my pedantry. I like taking words apart and trying to untangle concepts. What is value? What makes something good?

What does a tree look like?

You would think I’d have a quick response, given how much time I spend looking at them; but this is a difficult question to answer. Partly because words and their definitions are often vague, and partly because there are a lot of different types of trees.

But there is a larger problem. This question presupposes an observer. 

A tree doesn’t look like anything, it just is. A series of atoms stacked on top of each other. Without an entity to gaze upon it, nothing lookslike anything.

We often think of beauty as a thing that exists. Vistas and awe-inspiring mountains beckoning from beyond our daily life; just waiting for us to seek them out.

But it’s a lie. The visual landscape we find so captivating is an artifact of our perception. Of the specific wavelengths of light our retinas can process, and the way our brain weaves it all together.

Do you think a bat or bug can see the world the same way we do? Their sensory input is divergent from our own, and so colors will simply appear different to them.

If someone asks what a tree looks like, it makes just as much sense to hand them a photograph as it does to show them a matrix listing out the position, velocity, and temporal values for a series of molecules. 

An idyllic landscape isn’t anything by itself. It’s just particles and reflecting light.

Isn’t that horrifying?

Without an observer so much of what I find captivating about the world stops to make sense.

My brain always feels like it’s trying to fold in on itself when I think about this. I just don’t know how to properly communicate the absurdity of this point, and that frustrates me.

This summer I went on vacation with my family to New Hampshire. When I was young we would always come up here. In the evenings we would sometimes turn on the television and watch old movies. This year was no different, except for the fact I can drink alcohol now.

After the movie I went outside to see if I could glimpse the stars. Surely this isn’t the first time I’ve done this on vacation, but I also can not remember any other time.

It’s incredible without the light pollution. When you look straight up the stars take on the form of falling snow. It’s confusing and magical. The after image of celestial fire blurred across my vision, reflected back up towards the sky by the surface of the lake. 

I went inside to get my family, and my mom came back outside with me. We sat on the dock, shivering in the late summer night, and alone in the dark we tried to identify the different constellations.

I imagine the past was worse in most ways, but I think it would have been special that so much of humanity could experience views like this daily. Without the light of the sun, when you look at a cloudless sky, it’s almost like you can stare into the infinity that lies beyond our earth. 

It’s been a stressful year for me. Breakups and thesis deadlines. But still, I have found the time to be raptured by the world around me.

I’m not sure how to use words to capture this spiraling emotion that moves in my chest. I just have this excitement to exist. I want to explore the universe. I want to look up at the stars. Listen to music. Love and be loved. Watch the way rain crashes into the sidewalk. I want the world to reflect my desire to be here. I want the trees to react to the beauty I find hidden amongst their leaves. I wish I could whisper into their bark, or to the cosmic furnaces exploding millions of miles away, and make it all understand that this universe is more than a matrix of position values and velocities. 

This is a beautiful world we live in.

My grandmother died a few weeks ago.

Death is more than a lack of future experience. It is the deprivation of beauty and love from the universe.

When my grandmother died, creation went with her. It’s hard to think about, because how do you imagine a world without observation, but the visual texture of reality disappears when we do.

To look through an old window during a December snowstorm or up at the stars on a warm night is to grasp the artistry of the universe. But these moments are contextualized through the experiences and history we have with a location. What we had for breakfast. A fight with a friend. Or a partner. A dozen past vacations spent here. It changes the way the world looks.

Death robs a sunset or a summer night of what they could be. Robs the universe of its very appearance.

Death steals meaning from reality.

And so an infinite amount of possible beauty disappeared alongside my grandmother. All the things she could have seen are now nonsensical.

That’s horrific.

So what could be worse than death?

Extinction

The wholesale loss of everything that is.

Sometimes living is stressful. Philosophers and regular people alike will question if being alive is worth it at all. How bad would things really be if we all just disappeared? I’ve heard people wonder this after a rough day or a breakup; or during an environmental ethics lecture.

But it would be bad. It would be catastrophic. 

I can’t think of a single important thing that doesn’t require life to exist. 

Justice: Justice is famously difficult to define. It’s the righting of wrongs. A balancing of the cosmic scales. What would justice look like if none of us existed?

Art: As we now know, the creation of novel artwork can be done efficiently with GPUs and computation. But would a world barren, save for servers constantly generating new pictures, be a world worth anything at all?

Truth: Evaluative statements or knowledge about the world. Would we desire a scorched earth, one where all that exists are math textbooks and reams of chemistry facts? True statements in a universe devoid of consciousness are worthless.

Beauty: As I’ve been trying to get at, the visual aspect of the world, something we assume to be inherent to reality, is but an artifact of cognition and eyesight. Without us there is no such thing as appearances. It’s impossible to imagine what a world without life looks like, because it does not look like anything. It’s just a soup of molecules, bound together by magnetism and gravity.

Love: Love is the interaction between two people. A parent and child. A kiss shared as the leaves turn red from cold. It’s a flood of neurotransmitters to your brain whenever you see thatperson. It’s identifying constellations during the last nights of summer. It’s moments made memories, reflected upon again in instances of quiet contemplation. It’s commitment. Love might be a lot of things, or maybe it’s exclusively brain chemistry. But it is a thing that exists, because we exist. We bring it into the universe, create it from aether, through the power of our actions and our experiences.

Imagine if death permeated the world instead. None of these things could exist.

Doesn’t that make you angry? A universe without any of the things we care about. A universe without beauty. Truth and justice. Love. What a sad, cold, place that would be. And no one would even understand what was lost. Or what could have been.

Maybe every life that’s ever been lived wasn’t worth it. We’d all be better off dead, perhaps. Or so the line of thought goes.

But just how terrible that barren universe would be. Complex systems dance across the night sky, and their interactions, intentionless and predictable, paint incomprehensible beauty. Works of art I’ll only ever get to see once, before they flow into something new. 

Imagine if my death reduced it all to nothing but physical computation. Just atoms stacked atop each other. Indifferent.

What luck I have, getting to sit here tonight and look at the stars. To find joy in their motion.

I don’t want to die. I don’t want my family to die. I don’t want anyone to have to die. I want us all to get the opportunity to sit wherever we want, feel the breeze wash across our skin, and experience whatever emotions come. 

I want us all to live. I want the universe to be full of people who can appreciate everything and anything.

Standing here alone, under the stars again, listening to music, I feel things intensely. My mom has gone inside but I am still here. To be alive is to experience. To see and to be emotional. It’s the wind against my face. The inverse of the status quo. The universe contorts itself towards disorder and stillness. And to be alive is to burn hot and move with excitement.

To create beauty with perception, and truth through thought.

That is valuable. It is worth protecting.

We must fight back. Fight death. Fight extinction. And keep beauty in the universe.