There’s something deeply cathartic about how nothing you do will matter in a billion years from now. There’s also something deeply problematic about looking at things in this way — you can never falsify, prove, or test things, because nobody from today will be here in a billion years to test whether what you did mattered or not. (It’s as good as saying as “unicorns exist.” The fact is, we don’t know whether they do or do not exist.)
I’m pretty sure that Beethoven, Michelangelo, or Da Vinci never thought about their work outlasting them or standing the test of time. They did what they had to, what they loved, what gave them meaning. Which is exactly the point.
While taking shelter under long-term time scales to prove the irrelevance of everything under the Sun is liberating, it’s equally constraining, because it prevents us from doing what matters to us, today.
Many a time, life is the art of meaning-making, the art of making joy out of nothing, making yourself matter today, now. That’s how you overcome transcendental apathy.