eOpicle

I have a peculiar relationship with facts. I love discovering them, but I'm increasingly suspicious of what they do to me. Every time I encounter something genuinely astonishing about the universe, the natural world, human biology, or the strange machinery of consciousness, I experience two emotions that should probably have no business occupying the same brain at the same time. Wonder and existential dread. Wonder because reality is considerably more extraordinary than the version of it I carry around in my head. Dread because every new discovery reminds me how little I actually understand about the existence I've been participating in my entire life. And somehow, after contemplating the unimaginable complexity of the cosmos, the astonishing ingenuity of evolution, and the mathematical absurdity of my own existence, I still find myself getting irritated because someone is driving five miles below the speed limit. There is something profoundly ridiculous about being human. We a...