🪐 Stars, life, and experience

When you look up at the sky, you see all the stars shining. But what if I told you that the stars you see are actually images of them from light-years ago? The stars you are looking at are not where they are now, nor do they appear as they currently do. Because the stars are, or were, very far away from us, the light emitted from them takes light-years to reach us, traveling at the speed of light, which is approximately 300,000 kilometers per second.

Let me help you grasp this idea. Imagine I just published a website right now. However, your network speed is so slow that it would take two years for you to load the website. So, when you finally see my website, two years later, the website you loaded would not be the most updated version. It is the same with the stars you see—there is a lag.

If the Mayas, the Aztecs, or our ancient civilizations that took so much information from the stars knew that the stars they saw were actually images from light-years ago, would that make the stars or the messages they received from them any less significant?

Imagine if there were a time lag in our surrounding experiences—would that set your mind spinning? What if the environment, interactions, and experiences surrounding us had already happened ages ago? It just takes time to reach us, just like the light from the stars. We, as the bodies and mediums who experience these things, are the ones who are behind. What happened has already happened. What will happen has already happened. What is happening has also already happened.

As a startup founder, I’ve always believed that having related experience is an advantage because only after you’ve seen it do you realize it’s manageable. For instance, having met and worked with people at the #1 law firm for IPOs in the U.S., Cooley LLP, I no longer view taking a company public—offering an IPO—as a daunting task. I still remember seeing the Korean manager, a friend of my former boss, at the San Diego branch office with more than thirty bottles of Red Bull on the table. While I don’t recall the technical details, these exchanges and experiences instilled in me the spirit and courage to bring my future companies public. However, for my current team or friends who haven’t had this first-hand experience, it might be difficult to convey this perspective. To them, taking a company to IPO might seem as unfamiliar as traveling to Mars.

We live our lives every second, but we don’t necessarily experience life every moment. In retrospect, it seems to me that many moments in life are trivial. For example, chewing my meal while staring at nothing contributes nothing memorable or inspiring, especially when compared to the Cooley experience. On the other hand, of course, some might argue that even mundane activities like brushing, chewing, or breathing constitute experiences.

So, I guess that experience in use is experience of significance. If that experience offers no significant use, it would be an insignificant experience. But, how could I determine if the experience will not offer any significance in the future?