So what now?

So here we are alone in a dark and empty void, and nothing means anything.

Everything is just meaningless and pointless, yet we still wake up in the morning and we still go to sleep at night. Presumably we have a job and have to feed ourselves, possibly even put food on the table for others. We still have a life to live, but how do we do that now? With this knowledge? With this new understanding?

The truth is, it’s a luxury for us to even have these thoughts. If we lived in the Dark Ages or a feudal society — hell, if we lived in North Korea right now! — we probably wouldn’t have any time for existential crises because we’d have more pressing concerns than pondering the vastness of Space and Time? But we do have that luxury and despite the mundane realities of our everyday world, we’ve found ourselves in an intellectual void absent any universal truths or morals. How do we reconcile those two things and move on?

Well, if there are no universal truths, if there’s no man at a set of Pearly Gates waiting to judge us for our actions, then we are free — completely and utterly free to do whatever we want without consequence — at least no consequences after we’ve died. Of course there are the consequences of living within a society — the consequences that the representatives of society wield over us –, but if even those don’t actually matter in the grand scheme of things, then yes, we are one hundred percent free.

But there’s another side to this freedom. There’s an automatic dichotomy on the other side of that very freedom. The degree to which we are free from universal truths, morals and ethics, is equal to the responsibility we hold for creating and maintaining the truths, morals and ethics of the world and society in which we live, individually and collectively. If we are not subject to any laws or rules from a higher power, then we are responsible for the actual creation and adherence to such ideals and expectations in real life.

So again I ask, what do we do now? Well, the obvious answer to that question is another question: What kind of world do we want to create?

Yes, of course one could decide to shirk the responsibility entirely and just do whatever felt right in the moment, but that’s a decision as well, and supports and promotes a world in which those kinds of actions are the norm. You see, knowledge is a tricky thing. Once you have it, you cannot un-have it. In fact, at this point in the argument one could reasonably state that each and every self-aware consciousness shares that responsibility whether they realize it or not. In a world truly without universal truths or morals, it doesn’t matter whether somebody believes in them or not. Their belief is irrelevant. They share just as much actual responsibility in creating the truths and morals of society as any other, and pretending that responsibility actually belongs to some old man or some ancient book removes not one iota of their true responsibility.

So again the question isn’t what do we do, but what kind of world do we want to create? And each and every one of us has to answer that question for ourselves.