HTTP/2 301 server: nginx date: Sun, 01 Feb 2026 16:27:48 GMT content-type: text/html content-length: 162 location: https://fawadhassank.wordpress.com/feed/ x-ac: 3.bom _dca MISS alt-svc: h3=":443"; ma=86400 strict-transport-security: max-age=31536000 server-timing: a8c-cdn, dc;desc=bom, cache;desc=MISS;dur=309.0 HTTP/2 200 server: nginx date: Sun, 01 Feb 2026 16:27:48 GMT content-type: application/rss+xml; charset=UTF-8 vary: Accept-Encoding x-hacker: Want root? Visit join.a8c.com/hacker and mention this header. host-header: WordPress.com link: ; rel="https://api.w.org/" vary: accept, content-type last-modified: Mon, 26 Jan 2026 18:26:06 GMT x-nc: HIT dca 158 content-encoding: gzip x-ac: 1.bom _dca BYPASS alt-svc: h3=":443"; ma=86400 strict-transport-security: max-age=31536000 server-timing: a8c-cdn, dc;desc=bom, cache;desc=BYPASS;dur=310.0 https://fawadhassank.wordpress.com Tue, 01 Oct 2024 15:14:46 +0000 en hourly 1 https://wordpress.com/ 94950849 https://s0.wp.com/i/buttonw-com.png https://fawadhassank.wordpress.com https://fawadhassank.wordpress.com/2024/10/01/cosmic-drop-life-robots-and-the-poetry-of-existence/ https://fawadhassank.wordpress.com/2024/10/01/cosmic-drop-life-robots-and-the-poetry-of-existence/#respond Tue, 01 Oct 2024 15:14:46 +0000 https://fawadhassank.wordpress.com/?p=398 “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” Shakespeare, as usual, knew how to get straight to the point. We, like Hamlet, often find ourselves in the thick of existential crises, gazing into the abyss, wondering if the abyss is even paying attention. To be or not to be, that was his question, but let’s modernize it: To exist or not to exist? And if we do exist, what the hell are we doing here?
From Shakespeare to Schopenhauer, the great thinkers of history have tried to unravel life’s meaning, but here’s the thing: Life, it seems, is a cosmic joke, a cruel prank played by the universe on sentient beings. Take a seat, and welcome to the punchline.
Let’s start with the essentials: If a Robot attains consciousness, would you call that life? Picture Frankenstein’s monster, brought to life by human hands, stitched together from the dead, only to face a reality that offered no place for him. Shelley understood this in the 19th century — the terror of creation itself. Machines, for all their cold precision, will never know what it means to be alive. Their logic lacks the tragedy of Hamlet’s indecision, the yearning of Gatsby’s impossible dream, or the delirious rage of Lear against the storm.
Humanity is born into a world it never asked for, much like Kafka’s Gregor Samsa who woke up one morning to discover he was an insect. No existential manual was provided, no guidelines for navigating this bewildering carnival of suffering and absurdity. We are, as Dostoevsky’s Underground Man might say, walking contradictions — longing for meaning in a meaningless universe, seeking order in chaos, knowing full well that the joke’s on us.
We live our lives as mere visitors here, a point that Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic philosopher, often pondered. “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.” Stoicism teaches us that death is not to be feared, for it is as natural as breathing. Yet, we humans cling to our fleeting lives with the desperation of Macbeth clutching at his crown, though he knows full well that it all signifies nothing. Life is but a walking shadow, after all.
And in that shadow, we too, are like flowers, blooming only to decay. Shakespeare, always a fan of floral imagery, knew the transience of human existence: “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.” The flower, however, unlike us, seems to grasp its brief purpose. It blooms with fragrance, knowing it will fade, yet it never questions why. We, on the other hand, spend our days haunted by raison d’être — because that’s what it means to be human. Our minds are prisons, as Poe would tell you, and our thoughts, chains of iron.
The irony of existence isn’t lost on the ancients, nor on modern minds. Nietzsche declared that God is dead, but the corpse of that idea lingers on, decaying, while we sit here wondering if we, too, are part of the same divine funeral procession. Sartre proclaimed that existence precedes essence — we exist first, and then we figure out the details. No handbook, no guidance — just tossed into the deep end of existence, forced to learn how to swim or sink.
Let’s return to the metaphor of water. Life is a drop of falling water, I once heard, and there is profound truth in that. The drop exists for a moment, suspended in a fleeting second of individuality before it plunges back into the collective ocean. But in that brief fall, it exists, it matters. This, I suppose, is what makes us human — the refusal to believe that our fleeting lives are meaningless. Like that drop of water, we fight for significance in an indifferent universe.
But life, dear reader, has no reset button. Unlike the endless extra lives in Super Mario, here, we play for keeps. There are no second chances. As Camus’s Sisyphus reminds us, we are condemned to roll the stone of existence up the hill, only for it to roll back down again. But here’s where Camus, in his dark brilliance, finds salvation: We must imagine Sisyphus happy. To find joy in the absurd is to triumph over it. The drop of water falls, knowing it will disappear, yet in that fall, it finds its freedom.
And so, here we are — pawns in a cosmic chess game we didn’t sign up for, marionettes with strings held by an unseen hand, yet granted enough autonomy to question whether those strings even exist. Shakespeare’s metaphor for life as a stage is apt, but perhaps it’s closer to one of Beckett’s plays, where the characters wait for Godot, knowing full well he may never arrive. And yet, like them, we wait, we perform, and we play out our parts. Life is an absurdist play — equal parts tragedy and comedy, depending on how you look at it.
And while we’re on the topic of comedy, let’s not forget the greatest cosmic joke of all: We spend our lives searching for meaning on distant planets, building billion-dollar rockets to explore Mars, while ignoring the fact that the real mystery lies within. We are walking paradoxes, infinite in our complexity yet doomed to crumble into dust. It’s as if the universe itself conspired to create creatures that would forever search for answers to questions with no solutions.
Of course, this absurdity comes with a price. As Freud might argue, our psyche is constantly at war, torn between the primal id that craves instinctual gratification and the superego that imposes society’s moral strictures. No wonder we’re all a little mad. The mind, for all its brilliance, is an unreliable narrator, much like Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, forever dodging the reality he refuses to face.
We march onward, guided by some unseen force or perhaps just blind chance, like Icarus flying too close to the sun, knowing that one day we’ll fall. But here’s the twist: We are the drop. And in that descent, there is beauty. There is poetry in the fall, even when we know the inevitable outcome.
In the end, what remains? Perhaps it’s not about leaving a mark on the universe, for the universe cares little for our achievements. Rather, it’s about embracing the absurd, laughing in the face of the void, and recognizing that life’s value isn’t determined by how long we exist but by how fiercely we lived during the fall. The droplet returns to the sea, but it lived, for that brief, exquisite moment, and in that, it finds immortality.
So, play your part, dance your dance, and laugh along the way, because — spoiler alert — none of us get out of here alive.

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