We are all gods, we are all monsters.

You choose what to think about, every second of every day. Obviously there are some times when your choices are circumscribed to an extent. Like when you have a really bad headache, it’s hard to think about anything other than your really bad headache. And you just got dumped by a girl, it’s hard to think about anything other than that girl and how great she was and yadda yadda yadda… but like, you have a choice, every nanosecond of your life, how you spend your consciousness. And I mean that literally when I say spend, because it will be spent. It will be used up and then you will be dead. … You’re gonna die and your consciousness will have been spent. And this insane, unbelievable gift that we have to observe the universe, to observe each other, to cooperate, to collaborate, to build buildings like this one, to communicate with each other using language. All of that stuff is given to us, but only given to us for a little while. We choose how to spend it. One of the big ways we choose how to spend it is by choosing what to think about. I assume that a lot of us, I think most of us at least, would like to live a good life. And we’d like to use that gift of consciousness wisely. We’d like to spend that time wisely. We’d like to be able to look back on what we did for 30 years, or 90 years and say, “It was a good life. I’m proud of how I spent my life.” I want to make this absolutely clear, every single second that you spend thinking about the relative health of the romantic relationships of the characters on the television show Jersey Shore, that you chose to spend, … and every second that you spend choosing to think about astrophysics, or choosing to think about quantum mechanics, or choosing to think about whatever it is that you choose to think about is a second that you choose. So, the question becomes, how are we going to orient our lives? What are we gonna value? What are we gonna choose to think about? What are we gonna prioritize? Given that this is a temporary situation, and it is a crazy, cool gift that we have been given, this gift of consciousness.