Nothing matters. You may believe your soul is eternal or that karma determines your future lives. You may not believe any of that. Regardless, our trivial pursuits mean nothing in the grand scheme of things. Our petty squabbles, our victories and defeats, our joys and sorrows have no innate meaning. We are specks of dust on a planet in a universe that is almost endlessly big.

We’re all going to die. Maybe you’re that one guy on Twitter who thinks he doesn’t age but, news flash, he’s going to die and so are you, and so am I. Even if we find a way to upload our consciousness into the cloud, this physical body is withering away. Half my life has passed, and I am weaker at 40 than I was at 20. We’re all dying by the second.

Nothing matters and we’re all going to die, yet we still wake up in the morning to greet another day. We drink our coffee and we turn on the computer and we take the kids to school. Something’s pulling us forward. Something’s nagging at us to live. What is it? Maybe it’s living for living’s sake.

Some things matter and I’m not dead yet. I catch my wife looking at me and there’s love in her eyes. She touches my shoulder as she passes by while I cook dinner. My face in the mirror is like the one I see in our wedding photos but older. My son is crying his emotions and his tears are big and round and shiny like fleeting gemstones. He looks so much like me when I was his age. My aging father, drunk off two glasses of wine, is telling silly jokes at an expanded family dinner, and my brother and I roll our eyes. We fight and we argue, and, in the end, we sit down to eat together.

Some things matter, profoundly, because I say they do, and they matter for as long as I am around on this earth. It’s not a lot but it’s how I run my life.