ELI5: Help me comprehend death and not existing

There are no meaningful differences between "you" and "me". Our lives don't have objective meaning, nothing does, the best you can do is try to be happy, make others happy, and live a good life in terms of the moral standards you have. But no matter what you do, it doesn't matter at all in the long term. The truth is that despite all our wishing and searching there really isn't any objective or "point" to our lives.

But we're all so intimately connected to one another (whether atomically, chemically, and so on) that even divisions between "individuals" seems quite arbitrary when you look closely. The more you know about physics and chemistry, the more you realize boundaries between particular states (like the interior and the exterior, selfhood and the other, me and you) are fuzzy and arbitrary as well.

When you say you are viewing your life as the main character in a movie, think that all of us share a single life and each of us is just a different way to experience that life subjectively. So what are "you" exactly? To paraphrase Carl Sagan, we aren't disconnected from the cosmos or each others... we are all part of the same single superorganism-- we are the cosmos, each one of us, and because we exist the cosmos has a way to think, to be conscious, to know itself.

/r/explainlikeimfive Thread Parent