My Current Understanding of Reality

When I heard the question, “Why is there something, rather than nothing?” my simple thought was, “There just is.” But I never realized just how deep that question could go. When I began to answer it myself a couple of weeks ago, I came to realize I was staring into an abyss that was looking back at me. And it was not philosophically enlightening; it was just straight-up terrifying.

When you really think about it, there was a possible chance that reality could have not existed at all. There was a chance that “nothing” would be the default state of ____? Well, you can’t use reality to fill in that blank because that’s the opposite of true nothing. So I’ll just name it “The Absolute.” I will define The Absolute as the crossroad between nothing and reality.

My figurative truth is that The Absolute chose the road of reality, and that was a permanent decision. Now, The Absolute can never go back to “nothing,” and reality is and will be the default state for eternity. Hopefully, this isn’t a logical fallacy, but reality will be the default state for eternity because it has been the default state for a past-eternal amount of “meta-time.” This is another term I just made up because physicists say it’s inaccurate to use “time” to describe anything before the Big Bang. Furthermore, I believe it is logically sound to claim that reality is past-eternal because if there were ever a point in meta-time where there was “true nothing,” then reality would have never come to be. Think about this deeply. Imagine a state where you have absolutely nothing. True nothing. Not even subatomic activity. If you have nothing, there will never be the possibility of something forming, not even reality itself. For that reason, “true nothing” has never existed and never will exist. Forever.
I’d like to speak of this more, but it’s rather late. Let’s finish with the number line of reality, another thing I made up. Essentially, picture a number line, and at our current point in time, we’re at the number 0. Backwards, it extends to -13.8 billion years, the beginning of the Big Bang, and then from -13.8 billion years to meta-time. In the positive direction, the line will extend to a positively infinite time and meta-time, if/when the universe dies.

As far as I’m aware, there are holes in this logical explanation of reality. For instance, if reality is past-eternal, how would we have ever gotten to point 0 on the number line? You can picture this logical hole as running a race where you’re trying to reach the finish line, but you’re set back an infinite number of miles away from it. Obviously, you’ll never reach it. I’m sure there are other logical holes too.

Anyway, thinking about this stuff is truly horrifying, and it sometimes causes me to detach from reality. You’ve probably scoped out of reality if you’ve watched YouTube videos where they show you the scale of the universe compared to a banana or something. But if you scope out all the way to reality and "nothing", your brain will probably turn to jelly like mine. Interestingly, it’s made me more appreciative of short-form content, which has helped me ground myself. Obviously, media such as TikTok and Google Giggles can become a problem if hours are wasted as a consequence. But for existential terrors and death anxiety, it’s an excellent tool to snap back to reality after dozing off into the void. I find TikTok increasingly useful to distract myself from my own mortality as I age. At 20 years old, I no longer feel invincible, and suddenly, the worry of permanent death feels much more menacing. It kind of sounds like I’m sponsoring short-form content, but I’m genuinely just scared of dying.

I’d like to expand more on these thoughts soon, especially since this topic also ties to death and confirmation of permanent death after life. It also ties to the very, very small chance of there possibly being something after life.