Existential Terror and Breakfast

One

Malcolm Steadman was making toast when a terribly profound, and deeply troubling thought bore its way violently to the forefront of his consciousness. The morning before this was as listless and routine as any Wednesday morning. It was mildly agitating as the minutes had trudged by while his toast was cooking, but otherwise did not have any qualities worth noting or comparing to any other moment. Then the toast popped. The thought came suddenly.

His toast was a little burnt, just enough for him to notice the layer of black carbon that the bread had become. It had just occurred to him how immensely long it had taken the universe to create carbon, and therefore toast, and he was not prepared for the sheer weight of that concept. Carbon, like most matter, is forged in the raging hot fusion of stars, a process that is so impressively powerful it forces atoms to combine. Not enough can be said about how mighty this force of nature is. It took a full 200 million years after the universe was birthed screaming into the ether for a star to form and for the forging of matter to begin. These stars would burn and burn, crushing atoms into each other to create the furnaces of gods for billions of years. Billions. Only after they died, a process so violent and terrible that their corpses became abominations that eat light, could carbon be released. After a star explodes (and turns into physics breaking monsters) carbon would scatter into the unfeeling and uncaring void that is space, and eventually congregate into planets. This process, of stars exploding dust and debris, would go on for ten and a half billion years before the Earth would finally form. Ten billion years of exchanged energy to create a speck of rock streaming through infinity.

That rock would ferment and stew for another billion years before the most primitive form of life would be formed, and another 2 billion years would pass before life would produce sexually. All this time, the used up energy of stars would pass from one life to another. Carbon would be eaten, and stolen, from life after life, leaving an unbroken chain of dead organisms behind. Humans joined this greedy dance of thievery just 200 thousand years ago. It was not this process that set Malcolm into a panic attack. It is what we did with all this potential energy that freaked him out. Malcolm sat down, his muscles giving in to the burden of gravity. His toast was getting cold.

All of this, all of this potential energy, none of it disappearing but simply passing from star to rock to life endlessly. Shouldn't it amount to something? This, this was the thought that did him in, that truly made his existential terror peak: all of that time and carbon was wasted when we immortalized Honey Boo Boo. She would last longer than the pyramids. Traveling at the speed of light is the broadcast signal of the reality TV show Here Comes Honey Boo Boo growing bigger and moving outward as a sphere into space. When the Earth is consumed by fire and eaten by our sun, Honey Boo Boo will remain. When the pyramids of Giza topple, and even the words of the Torah are forgotten, the broadcast signal of Honey Boo Boo will remain. The pinnacle of Reality TV would even outlast the plaque left on the moon by Apollo Astronauts. Our greatest triumph. Honey Boo Boo won't be the only one either. Hitler was the first world leader to be broadcast into space and that broadcast will likely outlast all of the visible stars in the sky. Humanity at its worst, leaking into eternity like a urine stain that will never wash out. The death of numerous stars, the feeding fest of life, all of that carbon, wasted. All of that carbon. Wasted.

The injustice of it was too much.

Malcolm ate his toast.

Two

A vague feeling of guilt echoed above Malcolm's unforgiving hangover as light intruded into his eyes. The existential panic attack he would be having soon would be worse. Every bit of movement was like a heavy burden as he marched out of his bed. He was starting to think that waking up was a mistake. The crux of the morning was how he had gotten home. Malcolm indulged to the point that he had blacked out, and consequently had no recollection of how he had gotten home. Strewn across his now sordid house was a full set of clothing that he had worn the night previous and bafflingly enough there was a fully completed jigsaw puzzle on his coffee table.

Malcolm Steadman is not exactly known for his deductive skills, and is certainly no Sherlock Holmes, but it occurred to him that he had walked home from the pub, removed his clothing, and expertly assembled the jigsaw puzzle. He had done that, all without being conscious of doing it. A terrible dread was slowly building around him. This suggested to him that consciousness was not a necessary component to the complexities of his life.

The finished puzzle before him was one that he had owned for a couple of years. He had originally bought it after he had promised himself that he would take up a hobby and be more productive with his life. This puzzle would sit on his bookcase, gathering dust, acting as a testament to his inactive lifestyle. Now, it sat finished, mocking his fragile sense of agency. After he had blacked out, his body acted in an autopilot that was not just set to his basic instinctive needs, but also to his aspirations. If he was capable of deciding to do it without being sentient, was his consciousness, or his ego, actually in control at all? Was his sense of I or me the pilot to his life, or was it just a constant commentary on the automated actions that he would do with or without it? Was Malcolm in fact, just an awkward automaton with the illusion of free will? He had ceased to notice his menacing headache.

The terrible dread had turned into a full panic attack.

His heart raced and palpitated, his breath was labored, the false sense that he was dying hung in his mind. The puzzle was of course, unaffected by this. Here was the worse part of it: if his sense of being was an unnecessary commentary with the illusion of agency, then his panic attack was doubly so. Him being upset about never having freewill was totally frivolous. That, he thought, was cruel. Did it matter that he thought it was cruel? What was the use of his sentient protestations to a life of automation that did not need his permission to automate? If this is how it was going to be (or had always been), wouldn't it be less of a hassle if he was always blacked out? He imagined going about his usual day-to-day life, walking, eating, conversing, and yes, even solving puzzles, all without him being him.

His panic attack faded out of focus as his hangover fell back into the foreground. This was no better. He was still experiencing unpleasantness even though it appeared that experiencing that unpleasantness was a feature that was not needed. Could it be that the only true difference between him and his puzzle, was that the puzzle did not pretend to be? Only one of them insisted that they had volition.

Whether he truly decided to do it, or was preordained to, Malcolm Steadman began to spitefully, and violently, kick the puzzle before him to death. Each vengeful kick only enhanced the intensity of his hangover. He was vaguely aware that he was only spiting himself.

Then he got ready for work.

Three

It was a Wednesday morning and Malcolm thought his oatmeal looked bleak. He quickly corrected himself in his mind because he had actually meant bland. His oatmeal looked bland. It bothered him that bleak still made more sense in his head. That was actually what he meant. There was no reason to correct himself. His oatmeal was bleak. Incredibly bleak. He realized now that bleak was the right word because it was bland, but more importantly, because it was a symptom of something else.

It could not be overstated that it was a Wednesday morning. This was important to his current crisis because of the very nature of Wednesday mornings. Malcolm had just realized that he could easily transplant any Wednesday morning in his past with any other and that it would make no difference. All of them were a blur of blandness, routine, and most importantly, impotent acceptance that it was always the same. Sure, he could make promises, and certainly had made promises, to do something exciting or change a habit, but ultimately it would not materialize. The Wednesdays that he wasn't working, or fulfilling his dreary mid-week routines were anomalies. If he had committed to going skydiving next week wouldn't the next hundred Wednesdays be filled with the same mundane things they had always had? Even if he had committed to always do something exciting on a Wednesday for the rest of his life, wouldn't these monochrome actions simply migrate themselves to another day of the week? Wednesday mornings were a truer representation of his life than the exciting things he had done and bragged to his coworkers about. The oatmeal was bleak because it was symbolic of his very nature. Malcolm Steadman was a dry, flaky, and bland individual. Just like his oatmeal.

He wondered why it had gotten so bad. There was no warning ahead of time, his life had just gradually stayed the same. There was no one to tell him that routine and habit would pile up to eat away at his time and leave a collage of memories that were indistinct from each other. Was there something numbing about this, was nobody able to yell danger because it came with an impotent acceptance?

His oatmeal was overcooked.

Malcolm took a moment to desperately remedy the situation, knowing ahead of time that it would be in vain. He rummaged through his cabinet, trying not to think about how long his spices had sat there. After manically pushing things aside he found his target: hot sauce. In one movement he had jumped from his cabinet and was already drowning his oatmeal in a viscous red liquid. He knew that this would be one of those Wednesdays that would be lost and relentlessly buried in a mountain of cloned Wednesdays, but he could not bear the thought of letting this one be the same. After shoveling his spoon into his breakfast...no...his statement, Malcolm brought the food to his mouth and immediately regretted doing so. The regret was not from the searing meat that was now his tongue, but because it was really just a token victory. He realized now that it was not the sea of bland Wednesdays behind him that bothered him; it was the grand ocean ahead of him that he would have to endure.

The mundanities of life had to be opiates. They were numbing so that they would go unnoticed. The real villain here was time. Life, in its moment to moment beats, is unbearable. It is as boring as it is long, and it is very long. Now that Malcolm was fully aware of the nature of Wednesdays he was immune to its opiatic effects meant to shield him from the terrible existential horribleness to come. He would now notice, and have to push through, every bleak Wednesday that he would have to experience in real-time.

Malcolm did not eat the rest of his oatmeal because it was too spicy. He did not eat it because it was far too bleak.

Four

Malcolm Steadman had been staring at his toaster waiting for his pop-tart to finish cooking for what seemed like a full ten minutes. That is because it had been a full ten minutes. It took Malcolm another two minutes to realize this. This upset him.

The toaster had to be broken.

This, in any normal circumstances would be less of a problem, but Malcolm had been experiencing a string of terrible epiphanies too profound for him to handle and earnestly just needed a break from such heavy thinking. He was just supposed to eat his toast, ignore the injustices of carbon, pretend that he had agency and go to work, and ignore the bleak ocean of banalities and Wednesdays ahead of him. The toaster breaking, however, meant that he was now thinking about entropy.

Entropy.

Everything, no matter how grand and majestic, or small and useless, ends. If there is one constant, one rule that everything must adhere to, it is that everything is a slave to entropy. Malcolm, of course, is no exception. He realized that he had owned the toaster for nearly ten years. When it was gifted to him he was a much younger man, one with endless hope and a sense that everything in his life would work out. Yet each day since he had popped his first slice of bread into the toaster, the appliance, as well as himself, saw an almost microscopic bit of wear and tear. It sightly horrified him to know now that each act of toasting bread had actually harmed the toaster little by little until the filament in it had burned out. It severely horrified himself to know how much he had changed in that time.

The endless hope, the sense that everything would work out, had dwindled. He was jaded now, jaded and tired. He was ten years older and still working for very little. Things had not worked out. Things had not worked out, and he was just getting older. Slowly. The minuscule changes in his body and life would continue to happen, and without his permission, until he was no more. Malcolm would someday be as dead as the toaster. On top of that, he would be there to see it all happen, at a snail's pace through time. The worst of it was that he would be aware that he was aging, that Death's visit was only inching closer and there would be no one to save him. He would get older, weaker, and he would lose his faculties. His mind would slip from him and he would forget everything, and with enough time, everything would forget about him.

The universe would go on without him of course, but even that was not eternal. Decay had been happening to it the moment the big bang exploded it into the ether. There was not a single thing in the universe that could fight entropy because the universe itself lost before the fight had begun. Just like Malcolm himself, the universe would lose its luster. It would slowly grow weaker as stars exploded and grew further apart. Everything would break. Time and entropy would eat them all until even they themselves would cease to exist. A horrifying monster deaf and blind to its action, a monster so fierce that it would devour everything without prejudice, and it would do it slow. Painfully, horrifically slow. This monster, Malcolm entertained, had all of the patience because it knew it was destined to win.

Though it should seem obvious, it dawned on him now that what bothered him about this was that there was no protecting the things that made life so precious. The counted and recorded knowledge of generations and generations of people. Music that had sparked great emotions and inspired one to forget how to be embarrassed and dance. The breathless silence of a couple as they kiss for the first time as spouses in a wedding photo. Entropy would destroy them, and entropy would destroy them with as much thought as it gave even the worse things about existence: none. All would be forgotten at the heat death of the universe.

Malcolm ate his uncooked pop-tart from the toaster...

He would only find out later when he came home from work that the toaster was just simply unplugged.

Five

He was just trying to find something whimsical. Honestly. Malcolm had no intention of triggering another philosophical anxiety attack. The existential terror he had been experiencing every week was wearing on him. For the record, he let most of these moments pass and did not give it another thought until another one would occur. It was his subconscious, however, that was suffering. He was depressed now and lacked the energy to do the things that he had loved. He was not yet fully conscious of what was causing it, at least, not yet.

He was really just trying to find something whimsical. Something that would lighten his mood and his day. As Malcolm Steadman sipped on his black, morning coffee he landed on a web-page about apes learning sign language. Apes and sign language! There could not be anything more pleasant and whimsical! Malcolm caught himself making an involuntary high pitched noise in glee as he clicked on the article. This, this was the distraction he needed this morning. He was wrong.

He read about Washoe's abduction. He read about Koko's dead kittens. He let out an involuntary yell of terror.

There was a pattern that emerged between Washoe the chimpanzee and Koko the gorilla, a pattern of pain and possible self-awareness. Washoe was captured in West Africa by the United States Air Force to be used as testing for the space program in the 1960's, but she ended up being taught sign language at the University of Reno Nevada. There she learned 350 signs, including cry. Koko the gorilla, however, was born in the San Francisco Zoo before she was loaned to Dr. Patterson who famously taught her how to sign. She was able to learn more than a thousand different signs, including cry. The bitterness Malcolm now tasted, was not from his coffee, but from an epiphany: Was misery a side effect of language? If so, did we spread it unintentionally to the apes?

If one is not able to describe the trauma that they felt, if one did not have a word for it, was it real? Was misery only a condition of sentient thought because it had a definition? Before these female apes were taught words like cry or bad, did they live in a blissful ignorance? What was the purpose of communicating these things to them?

Chimpanzees and gorillas don't naturally cry. They shed no tears. It is not a natural concept for them. But Koko and Washoe cried when informed of tragedies.

Washoe, a previously happy and healthy chimpanzee who was possibly not self-aware beforehand was taught the magic of language, and for what purpose? To be miserable? Malcolm read that the first time she signed cry one of her handlers had told Washoe that she was absent for many weeks because her child had died. Koko signed cry when she was told that her pet kitten died, and again when her friend, Robin Williams committed suicide. Koko saw neither of these things happen! It was not as if Robbin Williams visited her often, did she need to know he was dead?

These scientists gifted these apes with language, they taught them the biggest cognitive breakthrough for intelligent species and with it gave them self-awareness. Reportedly, Washoe went through an identity crisis when she met other chimpanzees because she believed she was human. These scientist illuminated these ape's minds and then dumped all of their garbage and sadness into them. With this gift of knowledge came concepts like sad, and now these apes were terribly aware of it.

Malcolm was not aware that he had spilled his coffee on his keyboard. He would only notice it after he found that his mouth was agape for ten whole minutes and was now sore.

He was not aware of his pain until he thought of the word sore.

If the ineffable was only brought into reality after language could describe it, were the apes better off without it? Koko had known the pain of losing someone dear to her because she now knew what that meant, and no one thought about just lying to her.

Was Malcolm better off without knowledge or language? Would he have given consent to learning it if he had known what burdens it would bare?

Malcolm cleaned his keyboard and pretended that he did not see the symbolism of the tool. He resigned himself not to seek out whimsy for the rest of the week. He did not make more coffee, and he was becoming increasingly misanthropic.

Six

To say that Malcolm Steadman was currently doing nothing would be erroneous. Yes, in the normal sense of the nomenclature Malcolm was doing nothing, but in fact Malcolm was always doing something. At the moment he was sitting, he was staring into space and he was letting his breakfast cereal get soggy. Malcolm was breathing, and each breath he took burned a minuscule amount of calories and replenished his body with precious oxygen. If you asked Malcolm what he did with his morning he might look embarrassed, and as he would avoid your eye contact he would shuffle his feet and moan the word nothing, but again, this was far from the truth.

Malcolm was not proud of his life, he considered it a vague failure and had a constant nagging feeling that if he did not do anything with it he would suddenly find that it was too late to start. He was constantly comparing his life to others. What they had and he didn't, whether it was a healthy and loving relationship with others, or more money and a better career, seemed to justify his notion that he had done nothing with his life. This did not motivate him to change it, though he might swear in the moment that he would, but it did make him sad. Malcolm was often sad. If he had taken the time to be less harsh on himself, and had considered just how miraculous his life was, maybe he would be less sad. But he won't. He would continue his habits and things will get worse. So much worse.

The miracle that was Malcolm Steadman was impossibly more wondrous than he would ever give himself credit for. As he sat and did nothing 86 billion neurons in his brain worked together to create thought and consciousness. Malcolm's mind was a series of an immense number of cells working together to create the world's most awesome natural computer. Even as he listlessly looked down at his soggy breakfast, doing nothing these 86 billion neurons were working on his subconscious level to work out a math problem he had merely glanced at earlier and had forgotten about. As he shifted his weight to be more comfortable in his chair, and continue to feel bad about himself, this network of neurons passed on information from his senses to perceive the incredibly complex reality in front of him and it would render this perception faster than any