Everything You Do Is a Heist

I read another astrophysics book and went a little insane again.

When people ask why I don’t believe in God, I tell them it’s because I have to floss.

When people ask why I don’t believe in ghosts, I tell them not enough shit’s flying off the wall.

When people ask why I believe the universe is indifferent, I tell them it’s the only way it makes sense to me.

To me, every astrophysics lesson sounds like, “This is a quark. This is why gravity is interesting. This thing is in a dozen places at once. This thing shouldn’t exist but it does. This thing controls most of the universe but we don’t know what it is, so we’ve just been calling it the Dastardly Freaky-Deaky since the 1970s. Time is goo. Obliteration is salvation. Your brain is eating itself.”

Thus I tend to read all that and subsequently stare at the sky as if it were the ceiling of a child’s pastel bedroom with squid-like werewolves the size of blue whales roaming just beyond.

I have it pretty good, I think, as I run my stupid little errands instead of navigating a labyrinth so undefinable you couldn’t even name the shape, size, or material of the walls, let alone find your way out.

Years ago, I read astrophysicist Katie Mack’s The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) on lunch breaks while spending my blip of a blip of a life “doing marketing” at an apparel company. I’d then step back inside adrift and despondent, setting down the book at the edge of the nearest surface and sitting in a slump over my laptop to type out, “Nothing matters. Buy our tee shirts.”

It’s perhaps surprising I still struggle to swallow oblivion like a supplement recommended to me by an influencer I wouldn’t trust to water my pothos, given that I’ve never really seen the universe as anything other than the coolest, scariest ocean imaginable.

I’ve mostly zig-zagged between agnostic and atheist for much of my life. But even before the waltz, I took the western God as something I was simply told was a thing without any firsthand experience, like doing taxes or dropping a penny from the Empire State Building to split open a person’s head.

I didn’t realize the absence of such a fateful belief until I stopped eating meat toward the end of fifth grade and sparked a defining debate with my grandpa.

When I told my very Catholic Irish-American paternal grandfather I was now decidedly a vegetarian at the wise old age of 10—after an otherwise lovely pool day—he informed me I was “going against the will of God.”

Without hesitation—and in a bathing suit paired with what must’ve been a rather profound desire to make dinnertime worse for everyone—I scoffed, “I don’t believe in God.”

The smug tone was mostly to rile him up, because the truth of the matter was that I had surprised myself. And so I sat there in cutesy contemplation like, “Huh. Wow. What an interesting new avenue for yours truly,” as my grandfather lost his goddamn mind.

“How can you look at this world and not believe in God?” he asked before naming its many wonders—babies, sunrises, the Lakers.

I didn’t have a good reason. It was like someone asking who I thought built the Pacific Ocean. Who invented the sky? Who headhunted the wind? Who birthed infinity?

He was asking a kid who was still a year away from learning about Nebraska.

All I knew is that I didn’t see the divine in the world—and that, to me, was fine.

I thought the world was good and bad. Nobody got an award for the former. Nobody got blamed for the latter.

It just was. It still is.

This proved to be the first time I defined my purpose and place within the universe—and the answers were, and have largely remained, nothing and nowhere.

Yet it wouldn’t be for more than a decade in another debate that I’d define why.

On a college-era road trip, one pal sitting shotgun and one pal snoring in the backseat, the two of us observing Utah’s alien landscape struck up a dialogue about our respective and differing belief systems.

It honestly sounds like a scene I would’ve hamfisted into any of the unfinished screenplays I attempted back then. My friend was Christian, I wasn’t, and we were both supportive and curious.

Ultimately, and perhaps inevitably, he asked how I found meaning in my life without a grander scheme. He inquired with respect, as his measure of journey was entirely nonexistent within mine—so it was like asking how you know your height if you never check.

(Or how do you enjoy the drive without believing there’s even a reachable destination? How do your episodic storylines not feel aimless without a seasonal arc? How do you appreciate the little things if there’s no big thing to work toward?)

I explained that I liked believing the universe to be indifferent because it means I’m responsible for everything I’m doing and everything feels like a miracle.

I’ve never asked, “Why am I here?”

Instead, I can’t help but ask, “How am I here?”

There are hundreds of billions of planets in our galaxy and there are trillions of galaxies. The observable universe may’ve once been smaller than an atom. Our sun will likely devour Earth. The Big Rip could happen.

Everything I’ve been able to pull off during this planet’s sixth extinction is remarkable, from falling in love to finding a new Thai spot.

So reading any astrophysics book sends me into a delirious spiral because it ups my awareness of the outrageous odds. My towering insignificance on a cosmic scale makes everything I do at a ground level seem like sleight of hand bordering on illusion.

I am an arrogant bug on a flooded rock spinning through the infinite and I am making a grocery list. How can this be? How can any of this be?

I am forever plunging into the abyss of time’s junkyard as I put something on the calendar. I am choosing an outfit, I am looking over a menu, I am commenting on the ethereal beauty of the moon as a dozen rogue supermassive black holes prowl the Milky Way’s perimeter like raptors waiting for the electrified fence to go down in a film franchise I am for some reason still supporting during my cosmic nanosecond.

It’s almost impossible for me to be here and I’m getting away with all of it.

You have less than a century on this planet. Live long in a split second. You can't even rely on time to be a universal truth. Nothing matters. Take what you can get. Everything you do is a heist.