Lately, not much has been happening. Well, not much in terms of career progression and projects. My family did experience several health situations that delayed a lot of things I wanted to do.

The toddler is doing well enough. Things are going again. Though, I’m still worried about various things.

Life goes on. I still don’t know what I’m doing. Still trying to live my values, even though I often wonder to what extent I’ve compromised to try to live a good life, instead of being a saint and serving the just cause as I sometimes think I should.

The reality of things is that I’m just a Joseph. I’m not special. Chances are I won’t make a significant impact, good or bad, positive or negative. I can push weakly in the direction of a better world in very small ways, but it will mostly matter only to those few that actually seem to care that I even exist.

For them, I’m still going.

My moral stance nowadays is that if it matters to anyone anywhere, it matters, and what matters in the universe, is just the aggregate of all these cares and concerns. The greatest good is made of the desires and dreams of everyone, without exception.

I’ve realized at some point that most people don’t seem to care intrinsically about the well-being and happiness of others. They may follow some rules that they should care, but most don’t do it because they actually, deeply care. I don’t know why I care. Why should I care about the happiness of a stranger? Why am I so strange?

People likely don’t believe I care. I used to try to hide it, because it was too easy to take advantage of me otherwise. Now, I don’t care about hiding it so much. I just do what I think is right, when I can. But at the same time, I don’t know if what I’m doing is actually right, or just what I delude myself into thinking.

I sometimes imagine that there are things happening at multiple levels beyond comprehension. Like time travellers and aliens are fighting a war across the multiverse. But in reality, why would I matter at all in something like that? So, it’s probably more delusion and hubris.

There’s a joke about the priest and the helicopter. Once, there was a flood, and a priest was stuck on a rooftop waiting for help from God. A boat appeared and the rescuers offered to help the priest. He said no, he’d wait for God to save him. Then, later, another boat, and another rejection. Then a helicopter appeared with people who could save him, but the priest, in faith, chose to wait for God. Eventually the floodwaters rose and he drowned.

Later, when the priest was in heaven with God, he asked why he wasn’t saved. God replied: “What do you mean? I sent two boats and a helicopter!”

Sometimes I think, if time travellers were real, they’d be the helicopter.

But of course, time travel is probably physically impossible, or cannot actually change the past, but only make things happen as they were, or create a new timeline, leaving the old one untouched. Those are the ways you avoid impossible paradoxes.

If such things were real, it would have nothing to do with me. They could erase memories and create local reality bubbles or whatever. They could be completely invisible, plausibly deniable. Just inconvenience you for two seconds at the door, and then you miss the car accident you would have had. And you’d have never known.

Same with aliens or simulators or anything else god-like in their technological power. You exist because they want you to, if they exist at all.

But my life seems very mundane, very pointless, full of frustrating, inconvenient bouts of mild suffering. I imagine I might exist just for the entertainment of some bored entity that just enjoys psychologically torturing nice guys who finish last.

I have no way to prove it. There’s still good things in the world. Nice moments. Beautiful music. It doesn’t really fit the narrative, the hypothesis.

More realistically, life is just a bunch of stuff that happens. We are particles dancing in chaos.

I want for things to matter. And yet…

The world continues to turn. We live and dream and hope and are disappointed, and then hope again, and the cycle continues.

Life goes on. The cost of taking risks is the potential for disappointment. There is no avoiding this. If you take no risks, you will never do anything, never hope, never fear. But such a life seems pretty empty.

So, we dream. We hope. We fear. We hope some more.

Someday, maybe, I’ll understand. Until then, I wander through meandering thoughts and foolish musings…