Life is hard. I bought a new pair of shoes the other day, walked outside into the rain, and ended up stepping in mud. Now they're ruined and I'm bitter. But then I took a step back—not literally, of course—and really thought about it. I came to the conclusion that nothing in life really matters. Here's why:

The Earth has been around for four-and-a-half billion years. One day, humans became a thing and we became conscious. This world seemed perfect for us—it wasn't scorching hot or deathly cold; we fit right in the middle. The gravity on Earth was perfect: it allowed us to move, run, and catch animals that conveniently existed for us humans to eat. There was water to drink and oxygen to breathe. It's as if we were put here for a reason.

We began creating things, working together as a species, building empires, covering the planet, and fighting each other for whatever reason. Fast-forward a couple million years and here we are today—computers, rockets, Elon Musk, they're all here. Somewhere along the line, we also created something out of nothing: time. We've laid out definitions of time—seconds, minutes, hours, years—but it doesn't really matter. We've made those for our own use. Time is nothing more than a way to measure the passing of events, but we've only really set up these units based on ourselves. A day is how long it takes the Earth to spin around once; a month is about how long it takes the Moon to orbit the Earth and spin around once; a year is how long it takes the Earth to orbit the Sun.

You get about 78 Earth revolutions around the Sun in this journey called life. As poetic as that sounds, there's not much scale to these things once we pass a human lifetime. Sure, we can judge how long a thousand or maybe even ten thousand years are, but after that, the timescales become too vast for our brains to handle. As much as you think you understand the 13.8-billion-year lifespan of the universe, you really can't put that into an imaginable scale. On the scale of a human life, the universe is unbelievably old, but in terms of the universe's lifespan, pretty much nothing has happened yet—it's barely even started.

We can make predictions about the next hundreds of trillions of years of the universe's life. We can figure out when our Sun will blow up, when our galaxy will collide with another, and we can develop theories that describe why the universe we've been put into is expanding faster than anything else physically possible. But we have zero idea what happened in that fraction of a second between when there was nothing and when there was something.

For some reason, as far as we can tell, we're the only conscious beings to have ever existed—but we don't even know what being conscious is. We developed consciousness only to be aware of the fact that nothing else is there. We've grown so aware of our surroundings that the smarter we get, the smaller we become. As this thing we call time goes on, we begin to realize things that prove the universe probably wasn't made just for us.

You were most likely born in a hospital (if not, props to you for making it this far). Back then, you were your parents' entire world for a small time, which is cute, but you aren't everything. Three hundred and sixty thousand people are born each day. Of all those people with the same birthday, some are going to do big things and change the world; others are just going to die. That just happens.

But Earth is just one planet in our solar system—there's eight or nine of those for now. For life as we know it to exist, it takes so much to happen. We've discovered over 4,000 exoplanets to date—planets that don't revolve around our Sun—and we've found multiple examples of Earth-like planets, roughly the same shape, size, and temperature. But there's nothing there, from what we can tell. So if there are so many planets that could have life, why haven't we seen it yet? Why are there no signs?

Well, we're just one solar system in an entire galaxy. There are over 200 billion stars in our galaxy alone, but that's just one galaxy. We're part of the Local Group, which is a collection of 30 galaxies near our own. Andromeda is one of them—that's the one that's going to collide with our galaxy in about four-and-a-half billion years.

By then, you'll be long gone, and soon after that, so will the Earth. The Sun at this point will be reaching the end of its life. It's going to expand in size, and by the end, it will completely consume the Earth, shining over 3,000 times brighter than it does today. But even though our home planet will be gone, the rest of the galaxy wouldn't even notice. Billions of years on a multi-trillion-year timescale is truly nothing.

But even so, there are some things we're observing in the universe's infancy today that will drastically influence the far future. To keep it short: the universe is expanding. This is nothing new—a lot of people know this. But what many people don't know is that this expansion is speeding up. We don't know why, but we have an idea of what's causing it: dark energy.

Dark energy is stretching the fabric of spacetime. We don't know what it's made from—we know it's there, we observe its results, but we don't know exactly what it is or what it's going to do. Dark energy, at least according to our current calculations, will eventually stretch the spacetime between galaxies faster than the speed of light. The light emitting from our neighboring galaxies will travel toward us at the fastest speed possible, but even this won't be enough. The light will never reach us because the space between is stretching faster than the light traveling through it. It will spread the universe so thin that when we look out to observe what's around us, we won't see anything. We're going to end up all alone in whatever galaxy we end up in.

But in the end, even our galaxy will start to go dark. The fate of the Sun is the same as it is for all stars in the universe. Eventually, trillions of years down the road, these lights in the sky are going to begin turning off one by one. Without any new stars to keep things running, the universe is going to get colder. Depending on their size, these dying stars will turn into white dwarfs or neutron stars, providing the last glimmers of light in a cold and dark universe. This is the very last hope for any surviving life forms in the universe.

But eventually, trillions more years after the last stars like our Sun die, even these white dwarfs will begin to dim out. Some of these neutron stars roaming throughout the universe may collide by chance, resulting in the brightest known events in the entire universe: supernovae. But once these supernovae conclude, the universe is again plunged into darkness. All matter that used to make up the galaxies we see today will begin to fall into the black holes that kept things held together for so long.

The Big Bang that created the highest temperatures ever known to physics ultimately results in the most dormant, dark, and cold configuration possible—from a universe teeming with light and beauty to a cold, barren wasteland, a universe dominated by black holes. But even now, the universe has just begun. These black holes are going to be around for a while, and the things we used to call galaxies with stars and planets and life are now just going to be full of black holes, black holes, and more black holes. This is how the universe is going to spend most of its time: cold, dark, and alone.

We're no longer talking about millions of years here—the timescales are now in quadrillions of years. But even these black holes won't last forever. Through Hawking radiation, these black holes will slowly—very slowly—begin to evaporate away, one subatomic particle at a time, until eventually, after all the black holes fade out of existence, there is nothing left in the universe. A universe where nothing changes, where time becomes pointless. There's nothing.

The nothingness of space will continue to expand because of dark energy, a force that accounts for 70% of our universe that we don't even completely understand yet. Matter as we know it today—the things that make up everything you see—only accounts for barely 4% of the stuff in the universe. So maybe, just maybe, we're a fluke. We were never supposed to make it to the end, but we still have a role to play.

Today, we are one species on one planet in one galaxy in an almost indistinguishable part of the universe. Whether or not we came to exist, not much would be different. Every day we matter a little less and a little less until eventually we realize that in the grand scheme of things, we don't matter at all. Our galaxy could just disappear—it wouldn't really change much.

We came to exist in such a weird time, but it's also pretty unique. We know we're just the beginning, a blip in the universe's potential, but the only way to fulfill that potential is to start making progress today. It's not a stretch to say there won't be others like us—random spurts of intelligent life spread throughout trillions of trillions of years. But now we're at one of those stages where life is possible, and probably the easiest it's ever going to be.

You get one life to do whatever you want. There are some things you can't avoid, like school or taxes, but other than that, you're free to do mostly whatever you'd like. If we can't figure out our purpose for coming to exist on this planet, if we can't figure out why or how the universe came into being, then our purpose is whatever we want it to be. If you want to sit around and play games all day, there are people doing that. If you want to build a multi-billion dollar company that's going to help propel humanity to other worlds, there are people doing that as well. Anything you want to be or do can be done and should be done.