Aging, Atoms, and the Illusion of Me
Age is Such a Funny Thing, We say we’re getting older—but who’s actually aging? The me sitting here today isn’t even the same me from a few years ago.
Every part of my body keeps dying and rebuilding. Skin cells turn over in weeks, red blood cells last about four months, liver cells maybe a year. Even bones—the thing we imagine as permanent—replace themselves completely every decade. Around 98% of the atoms in my body get swapped out every year. So in ten years, I’m almost entirely new material pretending to be the same person.
So who’s aging, really? The body? The memory? Or just this story that insists, I am who I was yesterday?
We count years by how many times Earth circles the Sun, but inside there’s no calendar. Just constant birth and death—billions of tiny endings and beginnings every single day. Which makes me wonder: when I finally die, do I really? Or do I just rejoin the same system I came from?
The carbon in me might become a tree. The calcium, some animal’s bone. Maybe another human someday. Did I die, or did I just change shape?
Thermodynamics says matter and energy never disappear—they only transform. Maybe life and death aren’t opposites. Just two states of the same rearrangement.
The Chemistry of Feeling
But here’s what gets me: even knowing all this—the logic, the science, the inevitability—we still hurt.
If life is just molecules rearranging, why does a small chemical imbalance feel like heartbreak? Why does oxytocin feel like love, and cortisol feel like the world ending?
Biologically, it’s just patterns firing. Emotionally, it feels like everything shaking. Why the gap?
Steve Stewart-Williams writes in The Ape Who Understood the Universe that our brains didn’t evolve to know truth—they evolved to help us survive.
Our emotions aren’t built to make sense. They’re built to keep us alive.
When you feel heartbreak, the anterior cingulate cortex lights up—the same region that processes physical pain. It’s not poetic metaphor; it’s neurology screaming, Don’t be alone. Because once, being alone meant death. Pain became evolution’s leash, keeping us tethered to the tribe.
Even now, millennia later, our brain still runs that ancient program. It doesn’t care that we understand mortality. It just knows: connection lost = danger.
Why We Hurt Even When We Know Better
We all know death is inevitable. We say it, we accept it—and yet when someone close dies, it levels us. The logic doesn’t help. Our body never got the memo.
Because attachment isn’t intellectual—it’s infrastructure. Robert Sapolsky wrote in Behave that the human brain evolved to be relational, not rational. We survived because we bonded.
So the same system that once built tribes now punishes us when we lose someone.
When a person dies, your brain doesn’t just lose them—it loses a pattern it constructed around them. Their voice, their smell, the rhythm of their presence—all erased. A neural map suddenly full of missing roads. That’s why grief feels like freefall. Part of your internal architecture has collapsed.
Pain hurts even when we understand it because it’s not conceptual—it’s structural.
Understanding soothes the mind. But the body still remembers the bond. Maybe wisdom doesn’t erase pain. It just teaches you to hold it differently.
The Pattern That Feels
And this is what really unsettles me: that something made of atoms can feel.
At what point did matter start asking who it was?
The body changes constantly. Cells die, neurons rewire. And yet I still feel like me. Like a river that keeps its shape even as the water flows through. Maybe that’s what people mean by soul—not something supernatural, but this strange continuity of consciousness that evolution stumbled into creating.
Maybe complexity reached a threshold where the universe started noticing itself.
And that’s us.
Maybe There Is No Age
Maybe there’s no such thing as aging—just reconfiguring.
Maybe death isn’t an ending—just the universe exhaling.
If everything is matter and energy changing form, then maybe we never really die. We just keep switching shapes.
Maybe being human is just the universe remembering itself for a while… and then forgetting again. Until one day, that tree I became rustles its leaves in a wind that carries my echo back to you.