And whether you’re listening to Aristotle, or Confucius, or Harvard psychologists, or Jesus Christ, or a fucking Disney princess, they more or less all say the same thing, that happiness comes from caring about something greater than yourself. This is the feeling that we go to church for. It’s what we fight in war for. It’s what we raise families and save pensions and build bridges, and create startups for, this fleeting sense of being part of some great unknowable cosmic form. Ultimately, death forces us to confront the question of legacy. While most people worry incessantly about how to live a great life, the real question is, what will we leave behind? Because you are great already, whether you realize it or not, whether anybody else realizes it or not. And it’s not because you launched an IPhone app or you finish school a year early or you bought yourself that sweet ass boat. These things do not define greatness. You are already great because in the face of endless confusion and certain death, you continue to choose what to give a fuck about and what not to. This mere fact, this simple optioning of your own values in life already makes you wealthy, already makes you successful, already makes you loved, even if you don’t feel it. You too are going to die, and that is because you were fortunate enough to have lived. And while microscopic in scope, your existence will echo across the universe, reverberating in the tiniest and faintest ways, leaving your indelible mark in its wake. You do have to be massive to have meaning. You don’t have to be remembered to have created value. The way the trees that have fed our ancestors have been long dead and forgotten. We too will be dead and forgotten while our life force will have taken on some great, new, unnoble form. So yes, take a moment, give thanks for the miracle of your individual existence and enjoy your fucking coffee.

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