A Monkey at a Typewriter

Dear Humanity,

We are all children, stumbling through a world too vast and complex for any of us to fully grasp. I don’t know any better than you do. None of us truly does. Yet, here we are, each doing our best to navigate this endless, intricate tapestry of chaos and beauty.

So I have decided: I will engage with the parts of this shared experience that I believe are most likely to lead us to outcomes that are good, meaningful, and desirable. And I will avoid engaging with the parts that I believe will lead to pain, destruction, or despair. This is not because I think I am wiser or more capable than you. It is because it is the only way I know how to move forward—one step at a time, guided by intuition, reason, and faith.

If you, too, are a rational actor—a seeker of what is right and true—I trust you will do the exact same thing. You will choose your path as I choose mine, guided by your beliefs, your experiences, your understanding of what is right and just. And yet, in doing so, we must acknowledge a difficult truth: the limitations of our minds and the subjectivity of our perspectives mean that you and I will pursue entirely different things.

Our truths may clash. Our visions may contradict. In fact, it is entirely possible that you and I, despite our shared humanity, will find ourselves moving in directions that are antithetical to one another and that this will put us at odds. And that—as maddening and painful as it may be—is the nature of being human. To live is to struggle, to create friction as our paths diverge and collide.

But amidst that inevitable tension, I hold out hope. Hope that the ways in which our paths cross will matter. That those intersections will be meaningful. That they will be righteous and good and true. I hope that, in the moments where our lives brush against one another—even briefly—we leave behind something of value: understanding, compassion, or perhaps the smallest seed of change.

Such, I believe, is the role of a human being. We learn from the past—from the victories and the failures of those who came before us and in our own lives. We emulate the patterns that work, but we innovate at our own peril, risking failure and ruin in pursuit of something new, something better. And through it all, we press on. To the bitter end. We endure, because endurance is the hallmark of our species. We persist, even when the world offers us no guarantees, even when the future seems bleak.

In this vast and unpredictable experiment of existence, we are all part of the same story. Our roles may differ, our desires may conflict, and our actions may contradict. Yet I choose to believe that somewhere within this shared chaos lies the potential for connection, for beauty, and for meaning.

And so, dear humanity, I write this to you with humility, with love, and with the hope that we can each find our way—through conflict and harmony, through struggle and peace—to something greater than ourselves.

Sincerely,

A Monkey at a Typewriter.