Originating in a Meaningless Cipher

Too young, I learned that the world was going to end in my lifetime.  I have to be careful about how I explain this, but it was my interpretation of my mothers' plain language that armageddon was upon us and that the world seemed likely to end in some cataclysmic event such as nuclear war.  A quote I remember is that, "Jesus will come back to earth, likely in your lifetime."  The implications, which I only began to understand later, were that all was pointless aside from keeping on g-d's good side.

Later, my stepfather had a discussion with me about how the sun would eventually "burn out" and that life on earth was a precarious and ultimately pointless indulgence, endeavor, and farce that we all played along with as if there was meaning.

At 14 I read the Stranger.  I had been villainized, mocked, regarded as psychologically disabled and dismissable in my perspectives, complaints, and protests.  The Stranger resonated with me.  Perhaps too much so, but I read it cover to cover three times the night I first read it.  This author knew the life as an exilee from the kingdom of certainty of moral and purpose.  I identified with Meursault.

I never found my way back into society; always I feel the outsider.  Not the outsider as in unpopular but unable to indentify with social standards and conventions.  I've learned to edit my thoughts, but still I find others revulsion at my pessimism when I speak my mind.  No one likes to hear that their lives mean absolutely nothing.  Whether the Apocolypse will come in my lifetime, rendering labor and academics without relevance, subservient to piety and wholeness of heart; or the eventuality of the sun's expiry and the futility and farce that our wars, lust, mastery of medicine and mechinery, along with so much built for the progess of a species condemned by the finite lifetime of the life-sustaining generousity of our solaris -- it all seems without meaning.

"Why?" is a question that parents tire of, professors tire of and eventually mocks the impetuous asker.  In fact, the question eventually mocks myself.  The only absolute answer, and it is not a complete answer but an instinctive animal answer, is to perpetuate the species by space colonization, perhaps in mastering more of our bizarre host of the fabric of space and time -- or better yet meeting other life forms we can communicate with and share notes, learn from or even find a way to present questions and receive answers form the governor of this universe.

Therein lies my rub.