(18): We should spend our borrowed time creating a world rich in color and joy—because one day, your debt will come due. And when it does, no matter what you believe comes after life, your witness marks will remain.

(17): Life, to the fullest extent of our knowledge, is extraordinarily rare and unfathomably brief compared to the universe. To treat it with such disdain and ignorance is a tragedy we may not comprehend until it is too late.

(16): There is no “them.” There is no “mine.” How could there be, if everything is borrowed and we are all the same in death?

(15): We must learn to read these witness marks—in each other, in the world, in the quiet persistence of matter. We are all borrowing, and the more we recognize this truth, the more we can release our grip on “us vs. them,” on “mine, not yours.”

(14): I like to believe that as we borrow these microscopic building blocks, we leave witness marks—incomprehensibly tiny scratches and dents that record who or what once borrowed them.

(13): When the universe calls in the debt, we return our molecules to the cosmic canvas, to be reused again. In that sense, while our physical selves disappear, we never truly vanish. We live on in the infinite things our atoms will someday become.

(12): If our minds and bodies are the product, time is the currency, and death is when the loan comes due. We cannot live forever, and not a single thing we “own” will either. Entropy claims all—even our immaterial constructs like culture and belief. We are all borrowers.

(11): Human beings are made of the same recycled matter. The skin, hair, organs, and brain that compose our sense of self are made of the same ancient atoms as everything around us. We borrow them for the briefest flicker of time.

(10): Entropy is the great equalizer of all things, living and nonliving alike. Death for the living; decay for the inanimate. Yet everything that ends becomes the beginning of something new. The atoms remain, recycled endlessly since the Big Bang.

(9): Everything that comes forth from the fusion of matter and energy is built upon the ruins of what came before. And once built—be it a mountain, a gaseous exoplanet, or a human being—it will end.

(8): The matter of our universe, forged in a cataclysmic explosion, is static—it cannot be created or destroyed. Every atom and molecule has existed for 14 billion years and will continue to exist for an eternity, at least as far as we currently understand.

(7): Everything we are and own—absolutely everything—is borrowed. Our cars, our homes, our food, our pets, our children, and most importantly, ourselves. We are not 300,000 years old; we are 14 billion years old. We are cosmic guests born from a cosmic event (its origins, I will not claim to know).

(6): While we clamor to project our unfiltered opinions into the global town square of the internet, we, as a local, national, and global society, forget that our conflicts over “what is mine” (whether material, like property, or immaterial, like culture) are ludicrous human inventions.

(5): Fear and anger captivates attention. Attention drives engagement. Engagement prints money.

(4): Fear can rule above all else—even compassion—as our subconscious “fight or flight” programming is wired to protect us from both perceived and imagined threats. This is why traditional and social media are algorithmically tuned to amplify fear and outrage.

(3): Put simply, we are still driven by the primitive instincts honed during our species’ early struggle for survival against predators and an unpredictable environment.

(2): What we collectively fail to grasp is that our roughly 300,000 years of existence as Homo sapiens are a blip in time—a microscopic sliver of evolutionary development that profoundly altered our physical form but only marginally expanded our emotional intelligence.