My metaphysics inform my ethics and aesthetics. “What is” informs “what can be.” I’m an artist and a writer because of my beliefs about what is. I treat life like a film or a story or a game. I’m relaxed because I don’t think there’s much we can do. And further, I don’t think much matters.

Defining “matters” becomes interesting philosophy. As most philosophy seems to regress to nomenclature, defining terms is paramount. By “matters,” I do not mean that nothing seems important. Of course, love and hope and friendship seem very important to the human experience.

For a while, I thought it was truth that mattered. If I could only know the truth then everything would take on meaning. Then for another while, I thought it was self-actualization that mattered. In some pseudo-material way, we have a place to fill in existence, and meaning is filling that space by actualizing or making real each of our individual full potentials, so I thought. Truth and self-actualization, these two seemed to “matter.” The only way that I can think to explain why it is they do not matter is with a crude economic example, or rather, a question: how do they spend? In other words, in what market do they have any value?

In our real-world economy, currency is valuable because it can be exchanged for goods and services, which are then used almost exclusively to satisfy our animal need for survival. So we get to a value at the end of economic motivations: survival. But I ask the same question in the same way that continually asking “why” serves the same purpose: how does it spend?

Once we’ve spent enough currency to achieve survival, then how can we spend survival? How can we spend the time we have to live? And there again we uncover another value like we are digging in a mine and finding diamonds. Time is a value. But how does it spend? It spends in terms of changes in space. What else signifies time? If the whole world were to freeze and not a single physical change were to take place, wouldn’t we say that time has stopped? So if we spend time by changing space, how does changing space spend? Maybe the physical world is connected to mental and spiritual planes—then the metaphysical possibilities explode. But the point remains the same: nothing seems to matter. And it doesn’t matter because nothing really spends.

I remain alive because the phenomenology of the human experience is beautiful and artistic and I like to watch and continue experiencing it just like I enjoy films and books. I’m also alive because the universe has order. There are rules to the game. I enjoy the game of life like I enjoy a game of chess or a soccer match.

Overall, I remain alive because I enjoy life. If I didn’t enjoy it, I would remain alive for the possibility of enjoying it in the future. Even if only for one moment of joy, that would be worth a whole life of suffering. And even if all of life were suffering, I think I would still find a way to enjoy it by some sort of detached curiosity. I believe in my experience, and I am so deeply grateful for it, even if it doesn’t matter.