Harmful Properties of Light

Light flies at the speed of light.

It experiences all time,

from the beginning of time

to the end of time.

And it experiences no time at all.

From our perspective, it moves in time.

A photon takes, from our point of view, 

8 minutes to get from the Sun to the Earth,

for example.

But from the photon's perspective,

and this is how Einstein blew all our minds,

it's experiencing the entirety of its existence all at once.

A photon that was emitted during the Big Bang,

which just keeps zooming into the void forever,

is frozen in a single instance

that encapsulates the beginning and end of time.

(If time has a beginning and an end, we're not entirely sure)

It is but a single moment and all eternity at the same time.

Imagine you are born, go to school, get a job, date someone, break up with them, go to your parents' funeral, get married, make a child, leave them, start another family in another city, get retired, die of a heart attack— 

and all of this is happening at the same time, 

in the same moment, the eternal now, 

simultaneously.

Imagine the density of meaning and emotion.

Imagine the voidness of it when compressed

into a singularity.

As you go faster,

(again, what the fuck, Albert???)

time starts slowing down for you and you only.

Travel at speeds close to light for a few minutes, 

and return to Earth to find that centuries have passed.

The closer you get to the speed of light,

the slower time flows for you.

Slower and slower as you approach lightspeed.

Since light is at the maximum available speed,

its time has also slowed down as much as it can:

It's frozen.

Time does not flow at all

at the speed of light.

But you know what's even crazier?

Light is like this because it has no mass.

If it had some mass, any mass, 

it could not travel at the speed of light.

No matter how hard you pushed it,

you could get it to go real fast,

almost at lightspeed,

but it could never reach there,

just like the rest of us mortals.

So, if light had some mass, inertia, and responsibility,

if it didn't go in random directions as fast as possible,

if its feet dragged and required any amount of force to move,

any effort at all,

if it couldn't just vanish like a deadbeat father

without a care for the people it left behind,

maybe this motherfucker could differentiate

between the moments of getting married, having a son, and deserting them,

between one family and another,

between living and dying of a fucking heart attack,

instead of it all being mixed in a pointless soup.

Carpe diem.

Seize the day, boys.

Make your lives extraordinary.

Don't let it all go by so fast,

condensing everything into a single blur.

Savor every moment in the moment.

But also have some fucking mass, you bastards.

Have some fucking mass.

Have some inertia.

Experience time.

Let your shoes leave your imprint on the ground.

Seizing the day does not mean

there is nothing holding you back

from doing whatever the fuck you want.

Have backbone, exert some friction, weigh something!

Don’t leave your son and disappear.

Don’t turn your son into a fucking poet.

Fuck the fucking light and its selfish, unreliable weightlessness.

I hate you and I’m glad you had the heart attack.