The Automaton Who Knows

I just watched a YouTube video on existential nihilism. The lady was explaining, that life has no inherent meaning. She described the universe as indifferent, and the values we assign to things as constructions. Listening to her explaining, you would think she was talking about the weather, and I have to give her credit for this because it was very easy to follow. I found her and her standpoint very interesting and watched it to the end, even though I didn't agree with some of her arguments.

I have been, for a while, thinking about free will. While other people's days start in the morning, mine start at night, around midnight, when everyone else is asleep. In the quiet of the night, the construction of what my life is disappears, and I am finally at a place where I am me. Suddenly, the political climate doesn't matter. I am not an immigrant. I am not mummy, I am not a daughter, I am not in a geographical region. I am just existing in the universe.

I don't stay awake for long because I am tired, but the good thing is that the universe follows me in my sleep. In my dreams, I am aware I am dreaming. The world in the dreams is so beautiful—I can be anything and anywhere I want, despite my body being somewhere in a rural village in Ohio. When I wake up, I get stuck between being awake and being asleep, and I have the most honest conversations I would otherwise not have had with my husband. This is mainly because when I am fully awake, I am chronically editing things because I feel I know the answer.

When I wake up fully, I stare at the ceiling, and I tell myself, this cannot be it. I then go on—making breakfast, feeding the children, cleaning the house, doing laundry… like an automaton. Every. Single. Day.

I wonder if other people notice this routine too, and I think, probably or probably not. The decisions that we make in the day are not always really decisions. We are often just responding to economic necessity, to social expectation, to the beliefs inherited from family and culture and religion.

I had this conversation with an acquaintance a while back, and I asked them if they thought we were freely making our own decisions. The answer was a very strong yes, and in the argument that followed, they said it was God's will, and that everything happened for a reason. I found the argument intriguing because of the confidence with which they said those things simultaneously, without feeling the tension between them.

I have been slowly building my own position from the evidence of my own life. I think I believe in a supreme being. I think I believe in the universe. I wonder, though, whether they are not two separate things.

It often feels like the choices I have made were always going to be made. Even the mistakes. That feeling makes me wonder whether time is not linear—whether past, present, and future exist simultaneously in a block. If that is the case, then the version of me yesterday and the version of me lying in bed, breastfeeding, trying to put the baby to sleep while typing this, exist at the same time somewhere in the architecture of what is.

And if that is true, then I don't think we have free will.

I am an automaton during the day. I only realize this at night. I console myself because at least I know. Most people don't even get that far. But then again, what exactly am I celebrating? If the block universe is real, this moment of clarity was already decided before I was born. The awareness didn't save me from anything. It was just the next thing that was always going to happen.

I do not think nihilism is wrong, exactly. I think it might be incomplete. It follows the logic faithfully and arrives at "nothing matters," which seems true.

But it doesn't account for who made the thing that doesn't matter.

It doesn't account for the fact that, in as much as my life feels complicated and bumpy now, the journey to become the person I am has been meaningful. I have grown personally, and I don't think indifference would have made the person who is writing these thoughts down now.