The First Time I Questioned Why Anything Exists
By: Leopoldo Calderas
Tags: Existential Crises, Coming Of Age, Questions, Mathematics, Middle School

The numbers made sense. Streaks of expo marker on a white board in the form of a mathematical equation made sense to me in the 6th grade. It’s part of the reason why I had always liked math and hated literature. There are rules that a bunch of people from the past figured out, rules for calculating numbers from other numbers and for describing the natural phenomena in our world. And they are rules that work every. single. time.

Unlike math, literature was trickier for me to grasp and to enjoy learning. Mrs. Adams would ask what Edgar Allan Poe meant by the following passage in his short story, and I, a barely burgeoning middle schooler with no comparable life experience of my own shot my best shot at trying to explain what this full grown man was conveying with his choice of diction and imagery. “Umm nope that’s not right,” she would say in response, skimming the other averted gazes in the class for another chance to have the “correct” answer suggested. Frankly, I was pissed off at the lack of straightforward rules to follow to arrive at this so-called correct answer. How was I supposed to understand what the hell this guy was “actually” talking about?? This is part of the reason why I had always liked math and hated literature.

The math classroom was my comfort zone. Any problem thrown at me could be solved by memorizing a step-by-step procedure of scribbling and erasing numbers and symbols on a piece of paper. The questions posed in literature felt like clouds of ambiguity with no objective answer and no way to arrive at one. The math room was the place I could reliably always find answers, until a dreary Spring afternoon in 6th grade when my vision of the whiteboard blurred and my thoughts meandered elsewhere, to a place that let a disruptive question creep up: “Why does that whiteboard exist?”

My mind was quick to respond with a naive “because it just does.” That should have been the end of it. I could have focused back on the lines and graphs drawn and explained by the teacher for the remainder of the lesson, packed up, gone home, watched TV, and restarted the bewildering daily cycle that is middle school the next day, but my mind retaliated.

“What about the chair you’re sitting on? Why does it exist?” Well that’s just a dumb question, I thought. A chair exists because people designed it and a factory made it out of metal and plastic. “But why? Not just the chair. Why does this classroom you are in exist? Why do any of the people here exist? The air we breathe? The space we take up?” I thought back to the Children’s Bible a family relative had given me. I guess if an all powerful being exists then they are the reason everything I know exists. And that’s that.

“Why would an all powerful being exist?”

Hmm... A good question.

Okay, I thought, what does it mean to exist? What if nothing existed? What would that look like? What is absolute nothingness? At this point I started to feel my brain struggling, going into overdrive to first imagine an infinite white void. “Well if it’s white it’s not nothing.” Crap, okay a colorless void. “Well if it takes up space it’s not nothing.” This is where I crashed into the limit of what my mind could come up with and gave up.

I went home that evening a little distraught, perplexed by what it meant to exist and why the hell anything existed in the first place. I asked my dad, the smartest guy I knew. “Oh yeah I remember when I first started thinking about those kinds of things,” he said chuckling. He continued unraveling his work tie and walked away. Walked away! What?!

I hated not knowing. Math made it so easy to understand why any answer exists. You just follow the rules of reasoning and everything becomes clear. But there were no objectively true equations or algorithms I could follow that made it obvious why these math rules or the people that made them or the universe they were a part of existed in the first place. It was like being put on the spot in English class all over again.

Before actually leaving the room, my dad stopped in the doorway. He spoke with me in Spanish growing up, so I’ll translate a bit. “This is a really good question, one nobody has really figured out yet. Whole religions have been made in response to it because it’s such a big unnerving question. It’s not a question that leads to economic success or acquisition of resources, so many leaders don’t like the average person to waste time on it. It’s not something to be too worried about though, because your life will continue the same either way until any kind of correct answer to that question is found, which likely won’t be in our lifetime.” He gave me a hug and went off to consult with my mom what we should have for dinner.

I understood that to mean “not knowing the answer is a good answer,” which I found it hard to accept, but over the years I’ve come to agree with my dad. It’s a good question to ponder and it adds some perspective to life as a human, but spending too much time on it really takes you out of the moment from the things that can bring you joy, like most things really.