All lives are different, and some face hardships that others will never know. But we all share the same universe, the same laws of nature, and the same fundamental task of creating meaning and of mattering for ourselves and those around us in the brief amount of time we have in the world. Three billion heartbeats. The clock is ticking.

Intellectual fascination crosses many boundaries.

The universe is not a miracle. It simply is, unguided and unsustained, manifesting the patterns of nature with scrupulous regularity. Over billions of years it has evolved naturally, from a state of low entropy toward increasing complexity, and it will eventually wind down to a featureless equilibrium. We are the miracle, we human beings. Not a break-the-laws-of-physics kind of miracle; a miracle in that it is wondrous and amazing how such complex, aware, creative, caring creatures could have arisen in perfect accordance with those laws. Our lives are finite, unpredictable, and immeasurably precious. Our emergence has brought meaning and mattering into the world.

If there were some nefarious conspiracy to make the world look quantum-mechanical, it had to have been set up hundreds of years ago, when the light left those stars. It's possible, but doesn't seem likely.

The enigma at the heart of quantum reality can be summed up in a single motto: what we see when we look at the world seems to be fundamentally different from what actually is.