Simulation

I sometimes find myself spiraling into this question that just won’t let me go. Why do we even exist? Like, what is the actual point of you or me being here? Give me one genuinely convincing answer, just one, because I haven’t found it yet. If there’s a god, some supreme being who created all of this, why did that god create you and me in the first place? What was the reasoning? What’s the purpose of bringing something into existence just to watch it suffer, struggle, break down, only so that this god can step in later and redeem us? But here’s the thing that really gets me, if the entire concept of “us” is inherently meaningless from the start, then why even bother with redemption? Why does this tiny, trivial, almost laughably insignificant part of existence even matter in this incomprehensibly vast universe?

And when you actually look at the science behind our existence, it becomes even more baffling and unsettling. The cosmological constant, that precise value of dark energy that’s keeping our universe expanding at just the right rate, if it were off by even one part in 10 to the power of 120, we wouldn’t be here. The universe would have either collapsed back on itself instantly or expanded so rapidly that no stars, no planets, nothing could have ever formed. The strong nuclear force that holds atomic nuclei together, if it were just 2% weaker, only hydrogen would exist in the universe. If it were 2% stronger, hydrogen wouldn’t exist at all, and without hydrogen there’s no water, no organic chemistry, no life. Earth sits in this ridiculously narrow habitable zone around the Sun, about 150 million kilometers away, where water can exist in liquid form. Move us a few million kilometers closer and we’re Venus, a hellish pressure cooker. Move us a bit farther and we’re Mars, a frozen wasteland. The axial tilt of our planet at 23.5 degrees gives us seasons instead of extreme uninhabitable climate zones. Our Moon, formed by a collision so precisely angled and timed that it’s almost suspicious, stabilizes that tilt and creates tides that may have been crucial for early life.

Then there’s the fine structure constant, the gravitational constant, the ratio of electron mass to proton mass, all these fundamental parameters of physics sitting at exactly the values they need to be for atoms to form, for chemistry to work, for complexity to emerge. It’s called fine tuning, and it’s so statistically improbable that it makes you wonder whether this was all intentional or whether we’re just the one universe in an infinite multiverse that happened to get the winning lottery ticket. Either explanation is equally terrifying in its own way.

So here we are, in this one perfect configuration among infinite possible configurations, in a universe with trillions upon trillions of stars scattered across billions of galaxies, each galaxy containing hundreds of billions of stars, all of it expanding outward into an incomprehensible void at an accelerating rate. And what are we in all of this? What exactly are we? Microscopic specks on a pale blue dot orbiting an average star in the outer suburbs of an ordinary spiral galaxy. We exist for what, maybe 80 years if we’re lucky, in a universe that’s been around for 13.8 billion years and will likely continue for trillions more.

Everything I see in our world, all the suffering and pain and meaningless struggle, slowly makes me think that perhaps we never should have existed in the first place. That maybe existence itself is the problem. And that thought leads me down even darker paths. What if we’re living in a simulation, some advanced civilization’s experiment or entertainment? What if none of this is real at all, what if you and I are just projections, holographic shadows on the wall of some higher dimensional reality we can’t even perceive? Like those timelines in Dark, where everything is connected in loops that were never meant to be, where causality folds back on itself and traps people in cycles they can’t escape. What if we’re suffering right now because someone or something triggered an event in another realm, another dimension, and we’re just experiencing the aftershocks? Or worse, what if we’re an experiment that someone started and then simply abandoned, left running in some forgotten corner of a cosmic laboratory, doomed to play out our predetermined patterns with no one watching anymore?

What if this universe, this reality, just happened by accident, and it’s become a curse that perpetuates itself endlessly? I’ve read about the theoretical possibility of a Big Crunch, where the expansion of the universe eventually reverses, where gravity finally wins and everything collapses back into a singularity of infinite density and temperature, only to explode outward again in another Big Bang. Some cosmologists talk about cyclic models, eternal return, the idea that this has all happened before and will all happen again. And if that’s true, if the universe really does operate on these cosmic cycles, then every moment of your life, every choice you made, every heartbreak you suffered, every failure you endured, all of it will happen again exactly as it did before. You and I will be born again into this same existence, we’ll live these same struggles, feel these same disappointments, ask these same unanswerable questions, and die the same deaths, over and over and over, for eternity.

And if that’s our fate, if we’re trapped in an eternal recurrence with no escape and no variation, then what does any of it mean? What’s the point of trying, of hoping, of loving, if it’s all just a cosmic recording that plays on repeat forever, and we’re too trapped within it to even realize we’ve lived it all before?