Everything is new under the sun

A thought on the universal right to experience life

You are born once and you die once. Your singular existence never happens twice. Your senses will experience life once, the heart beating in your chest will love and hurt in one lifetime only, your beautiful brain will contemplate the universe and the meaning of life this one time. For you, everything is new under the sun.

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There is nothing new under the sun. In today’s society, we are often told that our thoughts, our experiences, our art, our stories, our pain and our joy are nothing others haven’t experienced before. We are mere shadows on the wall of countless other humans who have crossed in and out of existence on this planet. Eternally recycling the same human experience in different bodies and in different times.

There is nothing new under the sun. Everything has been done before—but not by you in your life that you live right now for the first and perhaps the last time.

It’s a paradox that in our hyper-individualistic modern society, the human experience is often reduced to a mere illusion. Perhaps it’s time to rethink the blueprint of our lives.

One time, one wild existence.

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This essay is part of my ongoing project Cognitive Ecology, a year-long exploration of society, technology, nature, and the future of life on Earth through aphorisms, reflections, and occasional long-form essays.

Thank you for reading,
—Claudia Befu