Feb '25 (edited) • The Archive 🗂️
Thrown-ness (4 mins)
Isn't the fact that we are here on this tiny rock so bizarre? We exist for such a small amount of time relative not only to the universe but for humanity as a whole.
The term 'thrown-ness' was coined by a German philosopher named Heidegger. It is one way to describe the nature in which we inherited our existence: we were quite literally just thrown into reality and found ourselves here, trying to make sense of how best to pass the time.
The bizarreness compounds when you realise that so many people have been and gone prior to our arrival. They too, were thrown into existence without any understanding of what the point of it all was: We stand on the shoulders of their discoveries. We see remnants of their civilisation, we are left to speculate how and why they did the things they did.
Last week, I drove past the Stonehenge. People started to build that thing 6000 years ago. 6000 years ago there were people who walked the same earth we currently do, and a large group of them decided to haul large slabs of various stones from different regions of the UK, and prop them up in circles. The reason? We can only speculate. The same can be said for the Pyramids of Egypt, or the Moai on Easter Island.
Mysteries of huge stone landmarks aside, seeing Stonehenge reminded me of my own impermanence, my time here is so short, there is so much I will never get to do. It also reminded me of my own ignorance, there is so much that I do not know, and even more that I will never know.
We are thrown here, with limited time, knowing nothing. This realisation, I think, is why I value philosophy and literature. No matter how smart you are, we can't live 100 lifetimes, we only get 70 years to figure out what to do with our time. What we do have, miraculously, are written meditations, letters, confessions and lessons from some of the greatest minds who were also thrown into this existence. We have stories, art, and compositions which have also stood the test of time because they impacted and shifted cultures. Perhaps the reason ancient philosophy and religious texts have stood the test of time is because people feel lost. You've found yourself in this random place, not knowing what to do or where to go, but there are written works from people who lived thousands of years before you, and knowing that they were equally directionless is comforting, Maybe?
There is no objective answer to the question why are we here? I think we'd do well to explore what is on offer, to learn from those who came before us, to cherish each passing day and make the most of them, to enjoy the connections we form and not to take existing so seriously: In 6000 years time, what will last from our current existence? Perhaps future humans will look upon the remnants of the Eiffel tower or the statue of Liberty and come up with some obscure myth about how we worshipped big hunks of metal? Or, with our primitive understanding and technologies, thought we could use them to harness lightning to power our society?
I’ll close with this: We cannot know the moral until the story is told, and that is what we are thrown into existence to determine.
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Thrown-ness (4 mins)
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