The Examined Life of A Firefly

The unexamined life is not worth living
-Socrates

Starting another week in the era of the Pandemic. This period in history will rank alongside the two World Wars and September 11 as pivotal moments in our modern history. Will there be more pandemics like this in the future? It is likely but humanity will be more prepared for it. This one has blindsided us but we will be wiser in the future.

This Covid-19 pandemic is a bit of an enigma: it doesn't consistently attack everyone with equally devastating effect. The majority are asymptomatic but yet you still cannot ignore the millions who either died or survived the disease after being hospitalized. It occasionally attacks the young as severely as the elderly and it has brought death to more than half-a-million people around the world.

Does the pandemic warrant such a severe lockdown all over the world, knowing that the economic hardship that resulted from it will be no less severe? It is a difficult question to answer. But we do know that out hospitals would be overwhelmed if we had allowed society to go on as usual. It is ironic that, in an era which social networking is the main byword, we are have to practice physical social distancing.

The world will always surprise us. Before September 11 and right after the collapse of Communism, writers were talking about the end of history. But history always have something up its sleeves. Like an epic miniseries, it introduced to us another plot twist: Al Qaeda and terrorism. And once that started showing signs of waning, we had another curve-ball thrown at us: the Covid-19 Pandemic, which turned everyone into mask-wearing, obsessive compulsive cleanliness freaks.

What will the next plot twist be? Climate disaster? Extra-terrestrial contact? Catastrophic collapse of our IT systems due to EMP or cyber-attacks? We don't know--we only know that there's no guarantee for our species. We are not special. We are just another one of many explosions of life on an insignificant corner of the galaxy. And like fireflies that flicker about gloriously for a night, we could gone without registering any significance in the larger universe. Even our universe could just be one among an infinite number of multiverses.

And here we are, tiny little egos trapped on a pale blue dot, pondering our place in this larger scheme of things. But at least, for 1 brief CPU cycle, each one of us, in our very own individual way, examined ourselves and realized our insignificance. And that alone makes all the difference.