"Bookends of Being: Consciousness, Culture, and Mortality"

The Orangutan Dad has been diving deep about some weighty topics.

We do not choose the circumstances of our birth—our family, our country, or the time in which we arrive. We begin with no concept of time, responding only to stimuli that shape our primitive understanding of space, motion, and the presence of others. Gradually, we become sentient, self-aware, and deeply influenced by the stories our culture weaves around us. These narratives shape our reality, framing how we interpret the world and our place within it. Much of life is spent reconciling these inherited stories with our direct sensory experiences—testing, questioning, and often struggling with the contradictions between what we are told and what reason reveals. Some of us reject the myths passed down through generations, seeking truth through logic and science, while others cling to them, finding comfort in tradition.

Yet, we are not purely rational beings. As primates, we remain tethered to ancient biological drives—seeking pleasure, dominance, and security, often at the cost of critical thought. The allure of charismatic leaders and shared illusions can override our capacity for skepticism, disconnecting us further from the raw realities of our origins and place in nature. We accept that life existed before us, stretching back through an unbroken chain of ancestors, yet we struggle to accept the inevitability of our own nonexistence. To soften the weight of mortality, many embrace comforting fictions, while others find a stark, unsentimental beauty in the symmetry of existence—emerging from nothing, returning to nothing.

To me, this cyclical nature is an elegant resolution, like bookends enclosing the brief, luminous interlude of being. Whether we accept it or not, life will continue—its dramas and wonders unfolding just as they always have—indifferent, yet exquisitely whole, without us.