Try to imagine a world where you don't exist: one where you were never in school, never had your group of friends, not a single late night talk, nor a story about something you shouldn't have gotten away with. There would be no talk of your first crush, love, first real embarrassment—nothing. Imagine a world entirely void of you in every possible way. Maybe your parents never met, or maybe they did, but someone messed up their first meeting and nothing came of it. Maybe your gene pool died out in prehistoric times, who knows.
But before you can begin to imagine that, think of how much impact every little decision you make has on the world. Think back to all the interactions you had as a child with other children, and how whether you were a friend, a bully, or the bullied, impacted you. Now think if things had been different, or not at all.
It's good to reflect on our lives, especially in an honest manner. Are we bringing anything good to the world we live in? Are we bringing more pain and misery than love and comfort? Would it have been better had we not brought anything at all? While my theological and philosophical presuppositions would utterly denounce the last option, the other two are important to take into consideration. Every single choice we make impacts people other than ourselves, and I think we can come to see that through thinking about how if we hadn't lived, hadn't existed, life would be vastly different from others around us. Would it go on? Of course, but it would not be what it is.
What changes? Life goes on whether or not we're there to get on with it, which in a sense makes us ultimately insignificant. But we see that if we're not there, at least according to chaos theory, the world because immeasurably different. So in another sense, we become incredibly significant. We must not mistake significant with good, or bad, however. Stalin was significant, and most would not consider him good. Even more interesting though, what would it had been like if he'd not been born? What about Hitler?
Life is crazy and full of choices and possibilities. They seem endless and impossible to predict, and we can really only go a couple decisions in advanced before we lose track of how things are going to play out. One thing remains though: the universe exists in such a way that we have incredible significance and the responsibility of that is inescapable. You may not have chose to be here, but you are, and now we have a possibly wonderful life to experience. The strangest part to me is the question, "Why does the universe exist in such a way where every single person has such a significance within the narrative of this small, blue planet? And does that extend further into the universe?" Personally, I think it's evidence that matches up with the claim that we're intrinsically valuable to God, who I believe created the universe. But it's worth thinking through, even if it brings on a few headaches.
(Source: www.forwallpaper.com)
A final note: In the field of Mathematics, there's a rather interesting fact about chaos theory and its utter randomness: Things look far from chaotic.
