For some reason fall is a time of pondering the meaning of life. Maybe it’s the falling leaves, making us wonder why everything dies. Maybe the cold keeps us inside and makes us read more. Maybe, for college students such as myself, the end of a lazy summer cusped by the onset of forced critical thinking sparks primordial pondering. Or maybe I’m just making baseless analogies to start this column in a snappy, seasonal way. Nevertheless, I’m half-heartedly sticking to this assertion.

You may have noticed that many schools of thought pertaining to the meaning of life tend to be either optimistic and life-affirming, or gloomy, dejected odes to the feebleness of humanity. But instead of telling you that life is transcendently and enigmatically beautiful, or an all-around pile from which we must emancipate ourselves, only to find we are in a field of piles, I am here today, dear reader, to tell you that life is:

Mediocre.

There. No translucent ribbons wrapped around the bountiful fruit basket of an autumn day, no existential quandaries eluding their own fruition, but simply, a dog, a Labrador, if you please, head sticking out of a vehicle speeding around Ring Road, ears flapping in the wind.

When is the last time you stuck your head out of a car window? Not because your windshield was too foggy to see through, not because you were craning to see a sign behind that monstrous truck stopped ahead, but simply because you felt like it.

Perhaps I was hasty in using the word mediocre. Maybe indeterminate is a better suited word.

But back to the dog. Really, you should try it. But I’m not telling you this as a way to make your life happier, or even more fun. Instead, what I really mean to say is that you shouldn’t assume that riding in a car should be done specifically one way or the other. Put your feet out the window.

That’s fun, too. Or maybe you should try stepping out of your car while it’s slowly rolling in neutral and walking/dancing alongside/on-top of it (It’s called Ghost-Riding the Whip. YouTube it.)

But enough of this hoo-hah. What does this have to do with anything?

Nothing. It has absolutely nothing to do with anything. But what more do you expect from me?

As meandering and abstruse as this column is becoming, it is not without a meaning. Because if I say it has a meaning, then by God, it has one.

I hope this column serves to enlighten you to the notion that perhaps nothing has ultimate meaning. Or at least no eternal meaning.

We’re all doomed from the start, really. Not just as individuals, but as a species, as earth dwellers, as a cognitive part of the universe.

According to the theory of entropy, all of the energy in the universe will slowly dissipate until nothing moves anymore. Kaput. Forget fossil fuels. The universe is running on empty.

Now, here’s where I am berated with comments about my insufficient knowledge of entropy, thermodynamics, physics at large, ecology, philosophy, teleology, theology or my disregard for religion and, namely, God.

No one can know if God exists or not. But I assert that I do know one thing for certain. The Earth, as astronomer Carl Sagan put it so eloquently, is nothing more than a Pale Blue Dot.

He was referring to an image taken of earth by Voyager 1 from record distance in 1990, showing the earth to be a microscopic dot against the incomprehensible vastness of space. Of this dot, Sagan remarked, “The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot… Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.”

Insignificant? Maybe.

But what defines something as significant? What makes our dot less relevant than any other dot? As I proposed earlier, nothing has ultimate meaning. Ultimately, no one living currently, and probably no one living ever, will at any time understand more than a fraction of the universe. Quantitatively, we will always be dwarfed by the universe. May its mysteries always tower above us.

But there is one thing that we do know, and I think it is better than knowing everything. We exist. Maybe everything around us is illusion, and no one else is real, and maybe even we have no self, but at least some non-existing self is fooled into believing it is an existing self. Maybe Sagan was wrong about us having no privileged position in the universe.

Because I’d sure as hell rather be a lowly, inconsequential human who is aware of himself than a nebulae that has existed for millions of human lifetimes but doesn’t even realize that it is such an ominous and mysterious thing, that doesn’t even realize that it doesn’t even realize.

So because we can even wonder if life has meaning, I think we are entitled to say that it does. Maybe it is to stick your head out a car window and feel the earth spinning. Maybe it is to go to college to get a job to earn money. Maybe it is to divide your day into three equal portions of sleep, work and World of Warcraft. Maybe it is simply whatever you choose to do. You may compare your meaning of life with that of others, and you may find yours wanting. But life only loses meaning when you say it does.