I can’t shake the feeling that our perceptions and intuitions can’t grasp what’s really happening right now. We are in an epic contest for existence. We’re peripherally aware of this but are anesthetized to it by normalcy. The rarity and specialness of our conscious existence exceeds our capacity to understand. We’ve inherited all matter of cultural code about how to think about life and death and meaning. I don’t buy any of it. Whether we realize it or not, we are players in a game. It’s our galaxy’s most epic game: sentient intelligence. The board is 100,000 light years in diameter and has a few hundred billion stars. We don’t know, but as far as we can tell, we are the only players on the board right now. There are illusions of peace. Coffee shops are open, markets are moving, politics are loud. The bigness of what’s happening can’t be seen except by careful observers. Even then, our brains are linear and the progress is exponential, blinding the wisest and most sober of seeing what’s actually happening. We need something new to awake us from our hypnosis and work with a vigor that defies even our own understanding.