Nobody knows what the heck is going on.

There are visionaries we look up to who seem to have a preternatural sense of the world: Ghandi, Obama, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Aung San Suu Kyi, Hawking. These and so many others we trust to make decisions based on a deep understanding and insight.

But whatever they know about worldly things, like the rest of us these people have literally no clue about the deeper questions of life. They may be directed and driven, but they don’t know why we are on this planet, what the purpose of existence is. Merely because they invoke in us a sense of wonder does not mean that they are intimate with the wondrous. They, too, experience that fleeting existential vertigo. They, too, lurch from the precipice of the unanswerable. (And they are lying if they say they don’t.)

For the most part I find that comforting. We’re united in our cluelessness.