Dear World

Dear World,

We are told from an early age that we can be whatever we want. We can achieve anything we put our minds to. We are told that the only thing stopping us in life is ourselves and the barriers and constraints we knowingly or unknowingly implement onto how we live. This is true, but it also is not. I am about to graduate from university with a Master of physics, astrophysics, and cosmology, yet still, I find myself in a situation of not knowing what I want to be or to do. 

I have always known I had wanted to be an astronaut. But only recently have I started to ask myself what this means. Why do I want to be an astronaut? To be an astronaut you have to be something else prior. Many astronauts were pilots in the military such as Buzz Aldrin, Tim Peake, and Chris Hadfield. Do I want to become a military pilot for the chance to maybe become an astronaut? Absolutely not. So then why do I want to become an astronaut if I do not want to have a job that requires many similar skills? Because of the wonder. The idea of being an astronaut has always resonated with me because of the chance to be able to see our home, Planet Earth, from a very special perspective. To be able to see landmasses as just that, and not different nations with arbitrary borders squabbling and fighting over things such as who can go where. 

We are all people. We are all in this together. The reality of the situation is that we are all living on a rock flying around a hot ball of gas at over 60,000 mph, which in turn is flying around an incompressibly massive black hole at some half a million mph. Yet, we find ourselves in a situation that requires us to spend up to decades of our already short lives with hardly any freedom at all over how we choose to live it. When we can finally decide on how we want to live, we have to make sure we can afford to not only feed ourselves but the people we choose to spend our lives within a completely made-up economic system in a small section of land in which we so happened to be born. Leaving this small piece of land that we decided to call countries can be difficult, or even impossible yet birds and other animals can have free rein (that is when we aren't keeping them caged up for inhumane food consumption, or to keep in zoos for entertainment. 

But even I who writes this am not immune to human nature. I drink cow milk and eat meat and go to zoos yet complain about the human impact on climate change and speak as if I am a career conservationist. No one is perfect, but the best we can do is to try. It is true that you can be whatever you want to be, but only if you are a straight white male with political views that aren't too strong either way. We tell ourselves there are parallel universes where there are infinite versions of you whilst we have no evidence for them (not to say they don't exist!). We tell ourselves there is a God who has a path for you and that everything that happens to you is for a reason, and we ridicule those for believing in said God when we also have no proof that He does not exist.

When it comes down to it, we just do not know. All of what we know about physics and the universe makes up less than 5% of it. Why are we so insistent on not showing love to each other, when that is all we have for certain? The American author Joko Beck said, "we are always doing something to cover up our existential anxiety".

We cannot control how the universe may end one day, but this does not matter if we are all happy. The first step to being happy is to be kind.

Yours,

Daniel Lowe