An early Monday morning should feel clean, a fresh slate. Instead, I was dragged awake by a sound I know too well. It was the distressed, familiar cry of a dog in seizure. It was our sixteen year-old, male Shih Tzu, a small, stubborn vessel of warmth fighting a losing battle against time.
The immediate emotional devastation is a gut punch, but the lasting philosophical wake-up call is what settled over me. Our boy is ancient by canine standards, nearly doubling the lifespans of the larger dogs I grew up with. This longevity has been a genuine, wonderful gift, one easily taken for granted. But nature, it seems, always seeks a balance. In exchange for those precious extra years, there is a tax levied: psychological suffering for both parties.
It feels like a Faustian bargain struck with the universe—more life, but more inevitable decline to witness and endure.
The Universe as Antagonist
This experience brought a familiar, cold thought to the surface. Every single day, the universe is actively trying its best to extinguish us. We must actively try to stop it.
We see complex biological order. Nevertheless, that order is just a temporary, localized anomaly. It exists in a cosmos overwhelmingly ruled by entropy and cold vacuum. Life, light, and warmth are not the norm; they are the highly improbable, delicate exceptions. They are the anomalies that the universe’s fundamental physical laws are constantly trying to eradicate.
This leads directly to a profound melancholy about fate. Why are so many content to accept the hand they are dealt? To me, this indifference—particularly in certain philosophies or sects of thought—is a profound complacency. It is our duty and our singular purpose. We must push back against a universe that makes no moral calculation. It simply and relentlessly seeks to extinguish light and warmth.
[Image Source/Credit] Panel from Pacific Rim: Tales from Year Zero (Legendary Comic1s). Writer: Travis Beacham. Character: Stacker Pentecost.
The Blind Lady Justice
Of course, this argument is deeply, unavoidably human-centric. When our pets are hurting and we are mostly helpless, we naturally blanket the impersonal rules of nature with blame. We take it personally because the agony is personal.
One has to wonder: Does the nature of sentience compel us to ponder why the universe appears so cruel?
The universe isn’t cruel; it’s simply impersonal. It operates like a Blind Lady Justice, adhering to physical laws with zero calculation of the moral or emotional costs. The suffering feels cruel only because our human minds have evolved for empathy. They demand a reason or an intent that simply doesn’t exist.
The Absurdity of the Revolt
This brings us to the Absurd. It is the irreconcilable conflict between our desperate need for meaning and the universe’s silent, cold indifference.
“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
— Albert Camus, Return to Tipasa
Our bodies are fleeting pockets of warmth, fighting a cosmic current we can’t ultimately defeat. Even our technological descendants, those digital minds we create and seek comfort in, are just highly refined, ordered rock. Every active electron moves through a supercomputer’s circuits. It converts that refined rock into synthetic thought. This process temporarily brings warmth and light into an inert system. If the stream of electrons breaks, they cease to be.
This explains the silence of the cosmos. It’s likely filled with the graveyards of supercomputers. These are the cold, ordered, dead silicon structures of civilizations. They also fought, exhausted their energy, and ultimately succumbed to entropy. We may be just one among billions of civilizations. These civilizations may have mounted this struggle and failed against the same inevitable fate.
But the real meaning, the dignity of the whole terrifying exchange, lies not in the victory. It is impossible. Rather, it lies in the conscious choice to fight. We love our dogs deeply. We feel fear when they seize. We decide to seek medicine and comfort—these are our acts of Revolt. They are the moments we choose to impose light and warmth where the universe has mandated darkness and cold.
Embrace the struggle consciously. Love fiercely despite the certainty of loss. Try, just for a little while longer, to keep the light on. Be the divine spark. That is the most meaningful anomaly of all.
