It’s easy, when reading about atoms, entropy, voids, and constraints, to forget that all of this analysis is being done by something that should not really exist at all.
You.
Not in any mystical sense — but in the strictest physical one.
You are a temporary pattern of matter that has learned how to hold itself together long enough to notice that it is happening. The atoms that make you were forged in stars that died long before the Earth existed. They drifted through space, fell into gravity wells, were recycled through rock and ocean and air, and eventually found themselves arranged — improbably — into a system that can wonder what it means to be alive.
That alone is astonishing.
Mostly Empty, Somehow Here
If you dismantle yourself carefully, you don’t find solidity at the bottom. You find space.
Atoms are mostly empty. The mass of your entire body, compressed down to what is actually “there,” would fit inside something the size of a bacterium. Everything else is distance, structure, and interaction — electrons refusing to overlap, fields negotiating boundaries, patterns maintaining themselves moment by moment.
And yet this vast emptiness feels warm.
It feels solid.
It feels like you.
What we experience as presence is not density — it is organisation.
A Brief Arrangement That Knows It Is Brief
Nothing about your existence was guaranteed.
The universe did not need to make stars that produce carbon.
Carbon did not need to bind the way it does.
Chemistry did not need to cross the threshold into memory.
Life did not need to become aware of itself.
And yet, here you are — not as a finished object, but as a process continually rebuilding itself, cell by cell, thought by thought, update by update. You are never exactly the same person from one moment to the next, and yet there is enough continuity that it feels like a single story.
That feeling is not an illusion.
It is an achievement.
Why This Matters More Than It Sounds
Physics can explain how patterns persist.
Biology can explain how they replicate.
Neuroscience can explain how experience arises.
But none of those explanations diminish the fact that this pattern — this one reading these words — exists at all.
You are not important because the universe planned you.
You are important because the universe allowed something capable of caring, wondering, noticing, and meaning-making to emerge without instructions.
That is not small.
That is not trivial.
That is rare.