BENMCMILLEN.NET

The Great Paradox of Your Life

10/10/2025

by Ben McMillen

I began writing a story about a tornado that ripped through our county in 1944, only to realize that nearly everyone who experienced it is gone. Their names, their voices, their memories, all fading with time. So I scraped that story and wrote this instead.

The Great Paradox of Your Life: In just a hundred years, every single one of us alive today will be gone.

The people you love, the ones who drive you crazy, the ones you secretly admire but never tell, will pass. The celebrities you follow, the politicians you argue about, the influencers filling your feed, all gone.

Even the people who once felt permanent, your parents, kids, your best friends, your mentors, your rivals, they’ll all exit the stage one by one. Some slowly, some suddenly.

The arguments will fade. The trends will vanish. The names that once filled your mind will dissolve into mostly obscure and forgotten history, just like the names of those who came before us.

It’s a hard truth to swallow, but also a freeing one. Because once you understand that this cast is temporary, you stop performing for them. You stop living your life as if you’re trying to win the approval of an audience that will one day disappear.

Instead, you start living for the moments that actually matter, the love you give without keeping score, the time you spend truly being there for anyone other than yourself.

The company around you will change. The story will end. But the way you treat people during your short time on this earth, that’s what echoes beyond you. That’s what shapes the future, one quiet act of decency at a time. That’s how we, together, move civilization forward.

The stages we walk on, our homes, our workplaces, our favorite coffee shops, will be filled with new faces and new conversations. They’ll laugh, stress, argue, dream and cause drama just like we did.

If you’re lucky, you get roughly seventy trips around the sun. Of those, maybe forty or fifty are spent as a so-called “productive” adult, the years where you build, create, hustle, raise families, make mistakes, and try your best to leave something good behind.

And that’s where the great paradox comes in.

On one hand, your existence is unbelievably small in the grand scheme. The universe doesn’t care about your job title, your follower count, or the exact date you were born. Stars will explode and galaxies will spin whether or not you get that promotion, buy that house, or check every box on your to-do list. Measured against cosmic time, your entire life isn’t even a blink. You are nothing.

But on the other hand, your life, your individual existence, means everything.

To you, this tiny window of time is all there is. It’s the only chance you get to feel the warmth of the sun, the sting of loss, the joy of laughter, the pride of creating something from nothing. It’s your one opportunity to show up, to care, to love people deeply, and to make the world around you a little brighter.

Your purpose isn’t to make a mark that lasts a million years. Your purpose is to make this brief life, this fragile, beautiful moment, count.

Be present for the morning coffee. The awkward hug. The unexpected kindness. The hard conversation that heals something deep. The sunset that stops you mid-sentence.

You will be forgotten someday. That’s not a tragedy, it's the truth. But the way you lived, the way you made people feel, the small good things you did, they ripple outward long after you’re gone. They shape the stories others tell, the values they carry, the kindness they pass on.

So don’t chase after some personal cosmic significance. Think bigger. Chase and search for human significance.

Be fully alive in the short time you’re given. Many years from now, long after we're all gone, the universe will decide if we did it right.

3 Comments

Beyond Left and Right: What Two Deaths Reveal About Us All

9/11/2025

4 Comments

“No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.” - Mary Shelley

The murders of Minnesota House Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and conservative activist Charlie Kirk are more than tragedies. They are warnings. Both lived on different sides of the political spectrum, yet both were silenced by violence. Their deaths remind us that the dangers we face in our divided culture are not about left or right, but about what happens when dialogue collapses.

Mistaking Evil for the Good We Seek
Mary Shelley’s words cut to the heart of these moments. Few people wake up wanting to commit evil. More often, they are convinced that their actions serve a greater cause. That twisted conviction, mistaking harm for justice, violence for righteousness, is what turns ordinary men and women into perpetrators of tragedy.

In these assassinations, the killers likely believed they were protecting something: their ideology, their values, their identity. Instead of creating safety or meaning, they destroyed life. They mistook destruction for “the good they seek.”

The Culture of Speaking Over Listening
We live in a culture that rewards volume over reflection. Social media algorithms promote outrage. Politicians win by landing the sharpest soundbite. Talk show hosts thrive on never letting silence linger.

But when speaking becomes our default, listening disappears. Without listening, empathy withers. Without empathy, the “other side” becomes an enemy. Once we label someone as an enemy, the leap to justify harm is frighteningly short.

The Cost of Not Hearing One Another
Melissa Hortman and Charlie Kirk represented very different political visions, but the same root cause sits beneath their deaths: the refusal to hear. The shooters were not monsters from birth. They were people who allowed anger, isolation, and ideology to drown out any possibility of listening.

When we stop listening, we no longer see humans. We see threats. We see villains. We see targets.

Choosing to Listen Before It’s Too Late
If Shelley is right, that no one chooses evil for its own sake, then there is hope. The antidote is not shouting louder, but pausing to listen. Listening does not mean agreement. It does not mean surrendering convictions. It means recognizing that even those we oppose are, in their own way, chasing happiness, safety, or meaning, however misguided.

When we truly listen, we can see where their pursuit went astray. And maybe, just maybe, we can prevent more lives from being lost to the illusion that violence is ever the path to “the good we seek.”

Editor’s Note
A few days before the murder of Charlie Kirk, I was on a backpacking trip with Father Mike, a practicing priest and a close friend. Late at night, as we sat around the campfire, our conversation turned deep. At one point Father Mike said, “No man chooses evil because it is evil.” The words struck me then, but in the days that followed they carried even more weight. What was meant for deep thought in the glow of a campfire became a haunting reminder after these tragedies. Curious about its origin, I did some research and discovered it came from Mary Shelley. That search led to this article. We have to do better. I believe it starts with listening.

Author

Ben McMillen

4 Comments

The Business/Consumer Relationship

4/25/2025

BLOG

Author

Ben McMillen

Archives

Categories