Where might you start a life reboot? How about the 7 billion billion billion atomic perspective?
20 mins on choosing to reboot one's life
For the voice recording of this post, click on the Spotify widget below. To play the recording in a different podcast provider, find all other providers here. Strongly recommended for this post as it’s a long, meandering piece ranging from physics to one’s philosophy of life.
A couple weeks ago, after 10 years in Sales, Operations, and Program Management, I left a very good job in the tech industry to pursue a new career in software engineering. I’m also sun-setting my standalone coaching practice for now so I can be all-in on this new path.
I don’t know what the future holds, but after years of reflection and experimentation, I’m letting go of the life I’ve built over the last 30 years to make space for the life I want over the next 60.
I created Learning La Vida as a capturing point for many of my reflections in this next chapter of my life. Writing and speaking help me untangle my brain, so publishing here is as much for me as it is for you. Thank you for being here, and always drop me a (respectful) note with any thoughts, ideas, and feedback at learninglavida@gmail.com. Social and whatnot coming eventually (new career first priority).
This first post is very meta for some people, but it’s important to anchor you around the frame of reference/ thought exercise I’ve used over the years to let go of the scripts I was relentlessly following and give myself permission to pursue new choices. Enjoy and don’t forget to subscribe for future ideas on life and the human condition.
Let’s start with a blank slate in the grandest scheme of things.
ZOOM WAY OUT
Despite our best science, we can only thoroughly explain about 5% of our universe. Everything else we call dark matter or dark energy.
You know how DNA makes each of us, “us”? Well… did you know every single human shares about 99.9% of DNA with every single one of the 7 billion people alive on Earth today? 96% shared DNA with a chimpanzee? 60% with a banana? Business insider summarized a TED talk on this, explaining that a “printed version of your entire genetic code would occupy some 262,000 pages… Of those pages, just about 500 would be unique to you.”
We’ve discovered an enormous amount about reality. So much so that we recently developed a vaccine to protect against a global pandemic in record time.
Yet we’re not much closer to understanding where consciousness comes from.
We’ve created atomic weapons by learning to split single atoms and thereby wield unthinkable destruction upon Earth and humanity. Yet we’ve each got 7 billion, billion, billion atoms in the average human body. And if you’re anything like me, our late night food binges lead to a different type of destruction with our atoms. I digress, anyway —
Big numbers are hard to see in perspective when you read them in writing. Let’s contextualize with a beach visualization: picture yourself on some sandy beach anywhere on Earth. Breathe in that fresh smell of water. Listen as the waves crash. You there?
Okay, now pick up some sand in your hands. Look up close. Think of all the itty bitty grains of sand in your palms. How many do you think are in there? Millions? Billions? More?
If this is just in the palm of your hand on this one beach, how many grains of sand do you think exist across all the beaches in the entire world?
An incomprehensible amount of grains of sand, right!?
Okay, go ahead and let the sand slip between your fingers.
Sit back. Relax. Breathe.
Soak in the sun. That bright, deliciously warm, bringer-of-joy in the sky. Our one sun. How amazing that all humans across the world share the experience of the sun in some capacity.
Do you remember when you first learned that our Earth orbits the sun? And it’s got so much space to travel that it takes an entire year to make one lap? And do you remember how mind-blowing it was when it turned out there are a bunch of planets, some much bigger than Earth, doing the same thing? THAT is how big and strong our one sun is!? Giant planets are pulled into orbit with it for billions of years!?
These days people have figured out how to take the energy from the sun and power entire cities. And the sun is so big and energized that we could do that comfortably for billions more years.
With all this in mind, how massive the sun must truly be, right? It’s almost an incomprehensible amount of size and energy. More mind-blowing still: Every star in the night sky is another sun, just like ours. Often much bigger than ours. Yet so far away that we experience them as tiny twinkles in our night skies.
Mm. What a reflective mood on this beautiful beach.
ZOOM IN
Now, let’s go ahead and focus on our breathing.
Slowly in. Then out. Breathe. Repeat.
Mm. Isn’t it nice to breathe? Don’t you wish you remembered to breathe more often?
Heh, you know, that said - isn’t it nice that our body remembers to breathe even when we don’t? Whether we’re conscious of it or not, our body keeps itself breathing.
It remembers so that every cell in our body receives the oxygen it needs to stay alive. Our cells get oxygen, so we stay alive every single second of every single day till our last dying breath.
Mmmm.
Life is sweet. Let’s say thank you to our cells for all they do all day long.
While talking about cells - isn’t it wild how every cell is made up of more atoms? That an atom is the unit of matter that we share with all of the physical universe? With the sun itself, the moon, and every organism that we share Earth with? Atoms remind us that everything—yes everything—is rooted in the same stuff and part of an incomprehensibly broader ecosystem.
Hey. So….
Remember our sun? Our glorious sun? And all of its peers in the night sky?
Remember those countless grains of sand slipping through your fingers?
Did you know there are more suns in the universe than there are grains of sand on our entire planet? Do you know how much space and distance needs to LITERALLY exist in the universe in order for that to be true!??
I know. 🤯
And so back to you and your 7 billion, billion, billion atoms… did you know that’s more than there are estimated suns in our universe!?!?
Which in summary means yes: there are more atoms inside of you than there are total suns in the entire universe. And there are more suns in the universe than there are even grains of sand on this very planet!
It only takes a few atoms to wield unimaginable force across this Earth, and yet we stay glued together all day long with an incomprehensible amount of atoms. 7 billion billion billion.
Mmmm… swim in that abundance.
OKAY RESET ZOOM
All this talk about atoms. All that we’ve discovered and built with our knowledge… remember that still only explains ~5% of what we call reality. The rest we label “dark energy” and “dark matter” in order to make the numbers work.
And that’s with today’s best scientists and computers….
Um…..
Hi 🙋🏽♂️
Anyone else wondering WTH is going on here?? I can’t be the only one that finds this is a little mind bending right? Going through this exercise tends to flip my sense of spatial awareness into overdrive. Especially knowing our best science still has a long way to go.
Whatever the reason all of the above is true, isn’t it obvious that humans weren’t the ones who created it all? That we’re merely learning to operate in a vast, mysterious, 95% not-yet-well-known universe?
From this perspective… isn’t it clear that the way human society works is a very “local” phenomenon in the grand scheme of universal things? That society’s current permutation of issues are specific to just planet Earth this very moment?
Isn’t it clear that human debates about what’s right and wrong are the mere product of an animal species that was more adaptable than its counterparts once the dinosaurs left and is desperately trying to figure out how to keep scaling while staying in charge? A species that continued to spread across this planet and take Earth’s resources for its own benefit—just like every other species on this planet would do if in the same position?
From this perspective, isn’t it clear that we’ve literally created agreements, policies, governments, values, life expectations, and so on primarily as a way to scale our species’ mass takeover of the ecosystem that we’ve always shared with the other billions of living beings that we can’t even communicate with? Some of whom we mass reproduce only because they taste good?
From this perspective, isn’t it clear, therefore, that every human is winging existence every single day? Isn’t it clear that, to our best knowledge, we are the most developed species to ever live on our planet, yet we didn’t build any of reality’s true underlying systems?
Today is the most advanced, interrelated day that humanity will ever face. The same will be true of tomorrow, and the day after that.
Given how little we truly know about “all this,” isn’t it clear that over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, we (human species) haven’t gotten to today through perfect choices? Quite the opposite actually — we’ve made better choices mostly as a reaction to learning how terrible our past choices were. We have systematically become better at conquering the Earth only because of trial and error and adapting more effectively than every other species on this planet to scale our expansion. Our methods change throughout the centuries, but in the grand scheme of things, the human species has done the same thing over hundreds of thousands of years: pursuing survival, scaling social cohesion through trial and error, and endlessly wondering why we’re here and what happens when we die.
So from this perspective… isn’t everything you know and consider to be true about how life and people work worth a closer look? If our best methods have only truly revealed 5% of our universal reality, how could we possibly know anyone from a series of posts they make on a platform that is algorithmically optimizing for us to spend more time in it? How could we possibly know anyone deeply based on their voting patterns? Their income bracket? Their race? Their past choices? Their family’s past choices?
You can’t. People have a literal lifetime of choices, experiences, thoughts, and habits that have come to produce who they are being in this very moment. The fullness of which can never be captured unless you were in that person’s head; the fullness of which always changes with every additional second of that person’s lived experience.
THE GOOD NEWS
That includes you. That includes all of us. Everything is constantly moving. Our atoms. Our cells. Our air molecules. Our planet orbiting our sun. Our own sun orbiting the galaxy’s black hole.
We’ll save black holes for another day but, do you see what I’m saying?
Not only is each individual’s life incomprehensibly nuanced (and therefore we all deserve space and grace), but all of reality itself is always shifting. Moving. Adapting. Turns out most scripts we’re expected to follow about our lives don’t stand the test of time because the world changes every second.
Adapting means learning and unlearning things—constantly. Sometimes the easy way. Sometimes the hard way. We paraphrase Darwin to say survival of the fittest, but the word he used was adaptable because he acknowledged being alive means navigating constant change.
Darwin taught us that being the most adaptable is—and I can’t emphasize this point enough—quite LITERALLY the common trait that made our species evolve beyond our chimpanzee brethren and take over this world to bend it for our comforts.
This is what most of my writing is likely to be about. The never ending quest we’re all on to adapt to the present moment. The highs and lows. The things that don’t have good answers. The questions we all ask ourselves more than we ever admit: how do we really live this life? What does this all really mean? What should it mean?
I wrestle with this stuff every day just like you, so capturing my thoughts here is as much for you as it is for me. Writing and speaking is how I attempt to make sense of things to untangle my brain. Like you, I’m not always successful, but through trial and error I’m trying my best to learn to adapt and create my life on purpose before I join the other 93% of humans that have already died.
Here’s the conclusion I finally found after 30 years of pursuing the script: your entire life cannot reach the social idea of perfect because social perfection requires a clear end-state that can be thoroughly validated by others that approve of the script. Yet… since reality always changes (and therefore all future possibilities), there will never be an end-state that can be validated by others as perfection. Playing the perfect game is a fool's choice—there's no winning. Instead you have to play the life game, where you make choices that bring you closer or further away from a future that only you can sketch in your own imagination. Every single moment is always the very beginning of the rest of your life, which means you've got to be an active participant on where your life is headed.
So: it’s up to you, yes you, to individually and intentionally design what a “good” life looks like for you. You can gain ideas from places like this blog, but you’re the only being that can ultimately choose what resonates with your soul today and what choices you want to make with the thoughts you’re currently experiencing and the future you’re currently imagining. It’s incredibly hard work to own your life in this way, but I’m crazy enough to believe it’s the most sincere, soul-loving way to lead your life. Otherwise you’ll blindly follow other people’s advice wondering whether checking boxes is all there was to this mysterious existence. If our atoms taught us anything, it’s that there’s much more than that to all this.
What do we do with all this?
Each of us must accept that change IS the only constant in the true grand scheme of things. That the only way TO continue our evolutionary march into the future is THROUGH an ever-changing present that we continuously adapt to and learn from.
We must each accept that learning to change is a never-ending process, but when it comes to being human, learning to change means learning to live.
Welcome to Learning La Vida, a place to discuss reality and the human condition. I’m glad you’re here. Thanks in advance for the space and grace, I’ll do my best to give you the same.
With sonder,
Ruben 🤟🏽