The Moon Offers a Peaceful Escape from Earth's Chaos

Good morning, John. There's something about the moon. It's just up there. It's peaceful. It's beautiful. It is unchanging. It's solid. Not like down here on Earth with all of our messes and our wars and our AI and our software viruses and actual viruses and back pain. The moon doesn't have any of that. The moon has no problems. And sometimes you can look up at the moon and think, "Yeah, that seems nice." I feel like all of us probably have a little bit of that feeling right now. Uh, it's just a place where the news cycle doesn't exist. Sounds lovely. No notifications, no governments making decisions. The moon has been a lovely distraction for a lot of people this week, including me. It is

in a lot of ways, I think, maybe the most peaceful place we can see with our naked eyes. Like, anything on Earth is going to be less peaceful than the moon. The sun, you can see that, but definitely less peaceful than the moon. Even if you count the planets, which you can't really see with your naked eye, all of them have more going on than the moon. And so we get this little piece of peace up in the sky that we can look at and think, "God, that'd be nice. It's a little break." But here's the thing. The moon is peaceful for a pretty important reason, which is that it is dead. You know, that's what the dead do is

hopefully they rest in peace, which is what the moon is up to. It is resting in peace. It has no wars, but it has no music. It has no back pain, but it has no backs. Like the worldview in which the moon is better than the earth is the one where all suffering is fixed by getting rid of all things that can suffer. And like technically that would work. Uh but it is not I don't think a solution anyone would advocate for. You don't cure a headache by removing the head. And so I feel like kind of caught between this like wanting for the piece of the moon and then looking back upon that want itself and being like oh it's all coming from somewhere. And the where it's coming from is a place that I

like and that I think is tremendously valid. Everything that makes anything matter exists because something alive wanted. And wanting is like what life does. I've made this argument on this channel before that, you know, if you want the shortest possible definition of life. Life wants this like respond to stimuli thing. No, it wants a thing, it needs to survive. Life wants life evolved want in order to keep itself going. And it used to be that our wants were very simple, like just sunlight for a long time. But as things have gotten more complex, so have the wants. You know, now we operate with a whole symphony of wants. We want connection and good food and novelty and information and safety and beauty and

power. And there's a lot to be said, of course, for trying to extract yourself from some of the wants. There's whole ideologies and religions and spiritual paths based around that idea. But the reason why is because want is extremely universal. We're always doing it. We're doing it all the time. The wanting is kind of the whole thing. And the moon of course wants nothing. And this is where I arrived at a thought that might be my favorite thought about the moon that I've had this week. The coolest thing about the moon is us. Like you could imagine an earth moon system where the earth is just as dead as Mercury and the moon is just as dead as the moon. And that place doesn't matter. There's a

billion of those all over the galaxy. The coolest thing about the moon is us. It's people looking up at the moon and thinking, "God, I could use a break." and writing songs about it and poems about it and telling stories about it and imbuing it not just with meaning but with personality with life. And it's astronauts leaving footprints in dust that will never blow away. And it's not just like the existence of the photons in space. It is the human on the other side of the camera that decided when to click the shutter closed. It is the human who is seeing something that no one else has ever seen before. Who wants to capture that beauty and share it with everyone, with me and with you. The moon

is peaceful and the earth of course has just a lot going on. Much more than any other place in the solar system, possibly more than any other place in the galaxy as far as we know. 8 billion humans all wanting at the same time. That's to say nothing of the nonhumans that are also wanting. That's going to be messy. As wonderful as the moon is, it would be nothing without us. It does not even make its own light. What we see is the sunlight that bounces off of the moon and reflects back at us. Just like all of the meaning that the moon has is just our meaning that is bouncing off the moon and reflecting back at us. To the astronauts of Artemis 2, welcome home. I did indeed wait until you were

safely back on Earth to publish this video cuz you know it's terrifying. But thank you. Thank you for all of your work and of course for your want. You wouldn't have gotten where you are without it. There's something important that life does that nothing else in the universe can do, which is that it makes things matter. John, I'll see you on