Everything will Disappear

A few months ago I was walking through the grand corridors of . Anyone who has been there knows the feeling. The place does not merely stand; it quietly dominates the land around it. The towering vimana rises into the sky with a kind of confidence that makes modern buildings look like they are still deciding what they want to become. Stones that have witnessed centuries sit there calmly as if time itself comes there for darshan.

As I walked slowly through the courtyard, a curious thought kept passing through my mind. What would this place have looked like when it was in its full vitality? When had just completed this masterpiece around a thousand years ago, the temple must have been a living universe. Priests chanting, traders bargaining, children running around pillars, travelers arriving from distant lands, kings walking through the same corridors where tourists now take selfies. In those days this place would have felt less like a monument and more like the biggest social gathering of the Chola world. A temple, a marketplace, a meeting hall, a gossip corner, a cultural festival ground—all rolled into one enormous stone organism.

Standing there today, one realizes that time has quietly edited the scene. The kings have disappeared. The crowds of that era have disappeared. Their arguments, their jokes, their ambitions, their daily worries—all vanished without leaving a forwarding address. What remains is the magnificent skeleton of their world. The temple stands strong, yes, but even this strength carries small marks of erosion. Restoration work keeps trying to bring back the old glory, and one day perhaps the repairs themselves will become the structure while the original slowly hides behind layers of preservation. Time has that strange habit of restoring and erasing at the same time.

While walking through that vast courtyard I began thinking about a slightly uncomfortable truth. The temple will eventually fade. Maybe not today. Maybe not in our lifetime. But someday. Even stone has a retirement plan with time. If a monument built with the ambition of eternity has a closing date somewhere in the cosmic calendar, then the rest of us are clearly working on shorter contracts. Our houses, our cities, our countries, our friendships, our rivalries, our bank balances, our arguments with the neighbor about the parking space—every single thing is travelling toward disappearance at its own pace.

Even the things we consider permanent are quietly temporary. The land we stand on, the nations we proudly draw borders around, the oceans we believe are ancient, the planet we call Earth, the sun that lights our mornings, the stars decorating the night sky, the entire universe that astrophysicists keep expanding in equations—all of it is moving along the same timeline. A very long timeline, admittedly, but still a timeline.

This is where the thought usually sounds dark to people. The modern world keeps whispering promises of longevity, anti-aging science, genetic engineering, and the possibility that one day humans might extend life dramatically. Very impressive ideas. I have no problem with living longer. If someone offers an extra decade or two of life, I will happily accept the extension. The only small doubt I carry is this: technology may extend life, but it usually extends the old age part of it. Nobody is currently offering a plan that takes you from eighty back to twenty-five. That feature still seems to be under research.

In any case, even the grandest scientific ambitions will eventually meet the same quiet manager called time. Everything ends somewhere. Even time itself probably has a closing ceremony scheduled in the far cosmic future. Which means the conclusion becomes unavoidable. Everything will disappear. You, me, our memories, our achievements, the compliments we receive, the insults we remember, the applause, the criticism, the entire dramatic stage of human life—every actor eventually exits.

Oddly enough, this thought does not make me sad. It does the opposite. It liberates me. When everything is temporary, the fear of small things begins to look slightly ridiculous. The fear of judgment becomes lighter. The pressure to impress people loses its grip. A boss shouting in the office suddenly looks like a temporary character in a very temporary play. Even our own ego begins to feel like an overenthusiastic intern taking itself too seriously.

If everything eventually disappears, then life is not a prison. It is a brief festival. A small window where a human being can experience existence before handing the stage to the next generation of curious creatures. Within that window there is immense freedom. Speak honestly. Create freely. Attempt things that excite you. Laugh loudly. Love openly. Express your thoughts without constantly asking permission from society’s invisible rulebook.

That afternoon in Tanjore I realized something simple while walking through the ancient stones. The people who built that temple are gone. The people who once filled that courtyard with life are gone. Yet for a thousand years their courage, imagination, and creativity continued to inspire strangers like me who arrived centuries later. Perhaps that is the real beauty of existence. Life disappears, yet the spirit of living continues to echo through time.

So the conclusion becomes strangely uplifting. Everything will disappear. Which means the only intelligent way to live is to live fully. Express yourself without unnecessary hesitation. Experience the world with curiosity. Carry humor through life like a personal philosophy. Enjoy the strange miracle of being alive on a small planet spinning through an enormous universe.

This is where the journey of this thought begins.

Everything will disappear.

And precisely because of that, life becomes beautifully worth living.

Historical Discussion

Human beings discovered this truth long before modern science arrived with its equations and satellites. Ancient texts had already whispered it quietly. The Bible, in the Book of Ecclesiastes, reflects on generations arriving and departing while the earth calmly continues its journey. Persian folklore carried the famous reminder, “this too shall pass,” usually told to kings who were becoming a little too proud of their victories. The message travelled across cultures with remarkable consistency: triumph fades, sorrow fades, even the most intense moment eventually loosens its grip on time.

Eastern philosophies speak about the same idea with elegant clarity. Buddhist teachings revolve around impermanence, the understanding that everything that arises eventually dissolves. The Bhagavad Gita views life through a cosmic lens where forms appear and disappear while existence itself continues its quiet flow. Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote with striking honesty that everything we see will soon vanish, and the people watching it will vanish as well. Imagine the most powerful man in the Roman world calmly writing that sentence in his personal diary.

Across religions, philosophies and centuries the conclusion keeps returning like an old friend. Everything changes. Everything moves. Everything fades. Strangely, the thinkers who spoke about it never sounded gloomy. They sounded free. When a person remembers that applause disappears and criticism disappears with equal enthusiasm, the mind becomes lighter. Life begins to feel less like a battlefield and more like a short festival that is meant to be experienced while the music is still playing.

Live and Laugh

At first the idea that everything disappears sounds like the universe delivering bad news with a very serious face. Then the mind slowly realizes something delightful: if everything fades anyway, the pressure to impress people becomes slightly ridiculous. Society carries a thick instruction manual—how to behave, how to succeed, how to maintain a respectable image, how to win approval from relatives who have opinions about everything from your haircut to your career.

Time quietly walks into the room, flips through that manual for a few seconds, and tosses it out of the window. The applause people chase fades away. The criticism people fear fades away with equal enthusiasm. Marcus Aurelius, who happened to run the Roman Empire as a side hobby, wrote in his diary that fame after death is simply the opinion of people who will soon disappear themselves. When even the emperor of Rome is writing things like that, it becomes difficult to take office gossip too seriously.

Once that thought settles, life becomes wonderfully lighter. You stop polishing your reputation like a fragile museum artifact and start enjoying the strange miracle of being alive. Sing loudly even if the tune takes a few unexpected turns. Laugh heartily without consulting society’s permission form. Dance when the music appears, even if the dancing resembles an enthusiastic electrical malfunction. Philosophers from the Stoics to modern writers like Alain de Botton keep pointing toward the same secret: impermanence is not depressing, it is liberating. Time has already booked the closing ceremony of this entire show. Knowing that turns life into a short festival rather than a strict examination. The smartest move is simply to participate with full enthusiasm while the orchestra is still playing.

The Biological Science behind this philosophy

The mind has an interesting design. Deep inside the brain sits the amygdala, a small alarm system that reacts to anything that threatens reputation, belonging, or social standing. Thousands of years ago this made perfect sense. A human being rejected by the tribe had a very short survival forecast. The brain therefore developed a habit of taking social judgment very seriously. A strange look from a colleague, a comment from a neighbor, a small insult from someone in authority—the mind begins reacting as if survival itself is under threat. When a person begins to understand the temporary nature of everything, something changes quietly. The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for perspective and reasoning, slowly takes the steering wheel. Suddenly a great deal of social drama starts looking like background noise in a very large universe.

Think about a man who spends his entire life carefully collecting achievements the way some people collect rare coins. He works endlessly to accumulate wealth, guards his reputation like a national monument, compares himself with others at every step, and builds an ego strong enough to survive minor earthquakes. Fifty years pass. The man retires with a respectable bank balance, a house full of certificates, and a slightly stiff back from carrying all that seriousness. Within a generation, the office he once ruled has new employees who have never heard his name. The files he signed are replaced by new files. The chair he fought to occupy now supports somebody else’s ambitions. The world moves forward with the calm efficiency of a train that forgot to inform one passenger that the station had arrived.

Understanding impermanence gently rewires the mindset. Growth begins to come from curiosity rather than fear. A person still works, still creates, still earns, yet the mind carries less tension. Reputation becomes a pleasant side effect rather than the central mission of life. The ego softens a little and humor begins to enter the room. When someone criticizes you, the mind quietly remembers that the critic, the criticism, and the entire audience are all temporary characters in the same short play. Strangely enough, that realization does not reduce ambition. It refines it. You begin to pursue things that genuinely excite you rather than things that merely look impressive on paper.

Everything will Disappear

The strange irony of our age is that humanity has learned to travel into space, decode the human genome, and build machines that think—yet we still rush toward conflict as if the planet has unlimited time to repair our impatience. Wars continue to erupt, lives disappear long before their natural sunset, and powerful nations compete as though permanence were guaranteed to the winner. History quietly smiles at this confidence. Every empire that once believed it was the final chapter eventually became a paragraph in a history book. Power fades, civilizations transform, and the names of conquerors slowly dissolve into museum plaques.

Marcus Aurelius once wrote, “All is ephemeral—both memory and the object of memory.” When one pauses long enough to absorb that sentence, the urgency to dominate the world begins to look like a very exhausting hobby.

If everything that exists today will someday fade into silence, the most sensible response is not despair but appreciation. Life becomes a brief invitation to experience existence before the curtain closes. The earth is here for now, the sky is here for now, the people we love are here for now. That is already a miracle generous enough to enjoy without rushing toward unnecessary destruction.

The Persian reminder “this too shall pass” applies equally to glory and anger, victory and rivalry. Knowing that allows a human being to live with greater gentleness and deeper joy. Instead of accelerating the end through conflict and ego, we can slow down and participate in the beauty of being alive—laughing freely, creating meaningfully, and sharing this fragile moment of existence with the quiet gratitude it deserves.