No Monday Without It
I had just put my daughter on the bus to her mother. The house was suddenly too quiet. The shop was going to close soon. I stood there wondering whether to go out for milk or just surrender to the sofa.
Instead I did the stupid thing: I opened my phone. First thing on the screen was a picture of the universe, a bright, busy map of galaxies and clusters, like someone had spilled glitter on a dark table. Above it a serious question from a physics account:
People were already writing essays in the replies. God, evolution, consciousness, simulation theory. All the usual suspects. Before my brain had time to warm up, a sentence slipped out:
"Couldn't do my Mondays without it."
I laughed, put the phone down, then picked it up again. My joke was bad but also entirely serious.
The question about the universe sounds profound until you look at it from the universe’s side. Does it have a purpose? As if there is a cosmic job description filed somewhere. As if purpose is written like a small tag on the outside of reality.
But we only ever meet the universe from the inside. On a Monday. In a McDonalds. At work. Holding a child's hand at a bus stop while she tells you she hopes the aliens have good food and no school, just in case she gets abducted.
From the outside there is no purpose. There is mass, energy, mathematics. From the inside there is this: you, trying to decide whether to buy milk before the shop closes.
We keep trying to turn a personal word into a cosmic one. Purpose makes sense for a life. For a family. For a project. It probably does not make much sense for a cluster of galaxies.
Still we ask. So maybe the better move is not to answer with big theories, but to flip it. A small Copernican turn on a quiet Friday evening. Everyone knows the old story: before Copernicus, people thought Earth sat in the middle of everything. The sun and the stars circled us like a royal procession. Then someone looked closely at the numbers and said, politely, that this was wrong. The Earth was just another rock in orbit.
You would think we learned the lesson. But we did not. We moved the planet out of the center and quietly put our anxieties there instead.
We still talk about the universe as if it owes us an explanation. As if the whole thing is on trial and we are the judge. Does it have a purpose? Can it justify itself? It stays suspiciously quiet about these important questions!
The truth is simple: the universe is not here to serve my life. My life is only possible inside this universe. Remove the cosmic background and there is no latte macchiato. No friends. No tired child asking about school and food and aliens. No social worker wondering whether to go for a run or write an essay.
In that sense asking whether the universe has a purpose is like asking whether your lungs have a career plan. Their purpose is that you breathe. End of story.
That does not make the question meaningless. It just means the direction runs the other way. The universe is the condition. Purpose is the accident.
When we say the universe has a purpose, what we really mean is: does my life have a purpose? Or maybe: Do I treat the people who depend on me as the point, or as extras in my private search for meaning?
If the universe has any purpose we can speak of, it shows up exactly there. In the way we treat each other inside this indifferent machinery. In the decision to keep paying attention even when nothing grand is happening. Show up for our family and our friends. Inhabit your Lebenswelt.
Maybe that sounds small. It is. That is the point. The question wants a cosmic mission statement. The honest reply is local. Almost embarrassingly so.
So yes, in my opinion, the universe has a purpose. I could not do my Mondays without it.