Sometimes I sit, in a library or a coffee shop, patrons idly chatting, clacking away at keyboards, or engrossed in their book or their Frappuccinos or whatever. And I feel as if I am burning at both ends.

Because sometimes, it all seems so purposeless. So I sit, and I watch, and –

I guess it’s just me. They seem to be doing fine.

I wonder what they’re all doing. I mean, I know, from a practical sense, that each person has their own goals for being there, at that time and place. They likely have a reasonable reason for being; they are accomplishing a task or a goal which gives them a sense of… accomplishment, purpose, contentment.

That’s the theory right? That life is a series of rooms, that we are players in a play: that old cliché.

On one side of the room, we have time, endlessly chasing us forward as we chaotically flow forward through it. A river which carries us, unstoppable and unconstrained by agency, choice, or reason.

On the other side of the room, exists space. Ever expansive, yet ever limiting. The bedrock of reality, bound by laws and limits. Structured by the tedium of our own physicality. Predictable. Mundane.

How can mere organisms cope with these fundamental axioms of reality, these ultimate opposing forces? How do we bring sense to the absurdity, and resolve the dissonance of our own existence?

Purpose.