We Are All Ant
For thirty years – from 1962-1992 – Johnny Carson hosted the Tonight Show. It was immensely popular in America, watched by many millions of viewers every night it was on. Yet, the vast majority of the people on Earth never heard of Johnny Carson, and that is already true of the vast majority of people in the United States.
Sports have been a major interest of humans since time memorial. The Greek Olympics are thought to have begun in the 8th century BC. Yet, how many people can name a single athlete from before the 20th century?
Such individuals as Johnny Carson and the great athletes were incredibly famous in their eras, and yet their existences are mere footnotes in history, that will never be known to 99.999% of the future population of the world. To be sure, there are occasional individuals for whom recognition persists. Archimedes, Da Vinci, Shakespeare. But even those rare people are known to a minority of the world, and they represent a nearly infinitesimal fraction of humanity.
The point if this is that we are, in essence, all ants. We live our lives – with all their (self-)important events, loves, fears, experiences, insights, conflicts, accomplishments, etc. – and then we die, to be remembered only by a few, and (even by them) for only the shortest of times. We are, in reality, quite fungible in the overall scheme of things.
This brings to mind It's a Wonderful Life – the 1946 Frank Capra film starring James Stewart. George Bailey (Stewart) is despondent, and thinking of suicide. But he is shown how much he has affected the lives of others. In the film, those effects are all for the good. But, surely, there were adverse effects, too. After all, just living has adverse effects (i.e., increasing pollution, utilizing limited natural resources, etc.). And – if we are all ants anyway – what difference does it make in the long run that we have helped other ants, whose own lives will have little, if any, ultimate consequence?
What does this mean in terms of how we should live our lives? What does it mean in terms of how we should treat others? If we are cruel or loving, productive or idle, learned or ignorant, what difference does it make? Are our inventions important? Our progeny? Our joys or our sadnesses? Or are our lives as altogether meaningless as those of the ants with whom we share the globe?