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The Making of a Dumb Datum

Imagine 10,000 years in the future. Two archaeologists are digging a site, and they find the remains of human bones. They take those remains to the lab, perform tests on them, and try to reconstruct the habits and lifestyle of that human. Say those bones belong to me. They are trying to find out my story, how I lived, what I ate, where I traveled, etc. Once they find all the info they need, they toss it into a museum where they store all other such ancient human remains they find. I was essentially one data point to them in trying to understand how humanity evolved over time. Or I can also call myself a “datum”, the singular form of data, literally one piece of information to solve a bigger puzzle. Honestly, I don’t need 10,000 years to become a datum. I am already a part of several datasets people use these days to study many things. So for that objective learner, I am already a datum. Now let me get to how I got the dumb part of it. I have had an interesting and eventful life so far...
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Heaven is overrated

I woke up with a sore throat and a mild flu today. It was about time I fell sick, considering I roamed in cold sand dunes last weekend, and I kept running in chilly fall mornings of Dallas this week. But I ignored it as usual and was prepping to go for my run. Then it hit me out of nowhere. By “it”, I mean Train’s ‘Drops of Jupiter’ song. I haven’t listened to it in a long time, so I have no clue why my brain suddenly craved to listen to it. But I obeyed my master and played the song (flies right in the face of all the stoic philosophy I have been reading lately, which keeps hammering the idea of having dominion over the mind with various analogies).  

I think drops of Jupiter is easily one of the most wonderfully existential lyrical prose written on this planet by humans. How can one counterargue this statement after reading the below lyrics?

Tell me, did you sail across the sun?
Did you make it to the Milky Way to see the lights all faded
And that Heaven is overrated?

It feels like the lyricist behind this song is taking pot shots at milky way and heaven. But maybe they are just trying to convey how things, which look amazing from far, can lose that quality once they are experienced from a closer distance. This happens not because those things are faulty, but rather because our minds have this flaw of always judging what’s amazing and what’s not. 

So, if everything’s overrated eventually, does it mean we stop experiencing things and just stay in a state of depression? Answer is no, at least according to the below lyrics:

But tell me, did the wind sweep you off your feet?
Did you finally get the chance to dance along the light of day
And head back to the Milky Way?

We can still let winds sweep us off our feet safely. Maybe we just need to be a little aware of how our minds amplify the feelings of good and bad we attach to external things. Apart from that, we don’t have to worry a lot, we still deserve to dance along the light of day. Especially because we sometimes don’t understand the insanely low odds of our existence as conscious beings on this planet. To understand this, think about all the atoms making our bodies up.

Some of these atoms have been around since the beginning of time, while many others were forged inside stars. So, these atoms could have very well belonged to a star millions of years ago, which disintegrated eventually to let these atoms flow out into universe. From there, these atoms had one hell of a journey – they could have belonged to some other celestial bodies which died, then maybe to some dinosaurs, and then to our legendary ancestors like Shakespeare (it is estimated that at least a billion of atoms in each of us were from Shakespeare), and when these ancestors died, these atoms went into ground and dissipated into atmosphere, and I don’t know how, but they somehow reached us. So, we are all but a temporary home to these atoms, and someday they will leave us for their next adventure. This is exactly why we should remember to celebrate the temporariness of all this existence by dancing along to the light of the day.

I’d be lying if I say I think about all this weird existential philosophy while listening to drops of Jupiter. What I think most about is how this song was inspired by death of the band’s lead singer’s mom. He imagined a beautiful concept of an afterlife where his mom is floating through the constellations, galaxies, wherever she can in this vast universe. He is imagining that there are drops of Jupiter stuck in her hair and he’s also asking her below question in the closing lyrics of this song:

And are you lonely looking for yourself out there?

 

 

 

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