The End

The future isn’t a place we’re going. It isn’t even a time we’re going. There is no future. Everything you think about the future is exactly that – a thought, an imagination, a fancy little construct you’ve built for yourself. There is no future.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but there is no future and it’s obvious because it hasn’t happened yet. Nope, it is not a place we are going, nor a time we are going! There is no future. More than that, there has never been a future. Who are we trying to kid with talk of a future, with our little dreams and fancies? Well, ourselves, I suppose. We’re trying to fool ourselves because the reality is that there is no future; there is only oblivion (oblivion in every direction, if there were any directions); oblivion and unknowing (and unknowing of that unknowing).

There is, of course, a past; an unchangeable repository of everything historical, memorable and unmemorable; a bank of our accounts, and (for better or worse) the eternal interest on those that just keeps on giving; a storehouse of all our stories from which we pull our memories to weep or laugh. Sometimes we hear it said that we need to move on from it, leave the past behind, and look instead to the future. But at least there is a past! At least there is something to look at in that direction! Look to the future? Who are we trying to kid?! There is no future!

Don’t shoot the messenger, but let me break it to you – you have no future prospects. ‘Hope’, ‘Prospects’, ‘Anticipation’ – these are words for now, not the future. ‘Future’ is a homeless word with nowhere to rest its empty head; a word without a meaningful meaning, it encapsulates nothing but nothingness. We can’t point at the future and say, “There it is”, because it isn’t there. It never is. It never is. And it never has been.

Oh yeah, we’ve all heard it said that there is a future. Maybe we’ve even been told that the future is known and perceived by some all-knowing, all-perceiving being. God. In the future there is no god. There is no god in the days to come, because those days do not and have never existed. There is no future, and in the future there is no god.

While the storehouse of history holding all the stories of billions of years of cosmos lies behind us, ahead of us there is nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing and nothingness. We are perched on the very edge of time, and from here we stare into the abyss.

So, you might wonder, if there is no future, when is the end? Don’t ask with such trepidation when you already know the answer. This, my friends, this moment right now, is the end.