Recently we asked members of the BuzzFeed Community to share their existential or "galaxy brain" thoughts with us.
Everyone put on their thinking caps, questioned the universe, and these are the results:
1. "I have often wondered what my life would've been like if I had made what might seem to be a tiny inconsequential choice differently. That also will lead to thoughts of how every decision I have ever made has led me to this point in time."
2. "I think of past lives and if they exist — does that explain why you hit it off with some people immediately and others you don't. I also wonder, did my children pick me before they were born or did I, somehow, pick them."
3. "I grew up always having people tell me what I should either like or dislike. Now that I’m older, I don’t know if I truly like or dislike anything because that's my genuine opinion or if it's because I was conditioned to see things a certain way."
4. "I have always wondered what strangers see and think when they look at me."
—BuzzFeed User
5. "This is the first summer that I've been living on my own, and because of that I've had to kill so many bugs. It’s been throwing me down a spiral that I've ended so many lives with just a press of my finger. I tell myself that they're just bugs and that it's necessary to kill them so that my cat doesn’t eat them, but these things have brains and thoughts and lives, and I end it all in less than a second. It’s difficult for me to just move on with my day after that."
6. "Now I often think about how BS the idea of the cost of living rising is. Why is there a fee to be alive? The idea that as humans we need to pay to simply stay alive is wild to me."
7. "When I was younger, I always used to wonder what it would look like if nothing at all existed, ever."
8. "I've had the thought, how did 'I' get to be 'me'? I can remember staring at my face in the mirror, trying to understand the fact that 'me' really meant my thoughts, beliefs, ideas, and dreams, basically my 'soul,' and that the body I was looking at was just transitory. If there is something after this life, what I look like won't matter, and the body I'm in will end up as compost. There will be nothing physical left to show the world that 'I' ever really existed."
9. "I often think about how the decisions we make, no matter how small, throughout the day can change the course of one’s life. I don’t believe in fate, or 'god’s will' or anything like that, but I think about how someone deciding to do something spontaneous puts them on a path to get into an accident, meet someone new, get a new opportunity, or even experience a near miss of something bad happening to them because they went somewhere else."
"I wonder how my life would have been if I hadn’t been on the road the night the wrong way driver hit me, because it completely upended my life. I wonder what my life would have been if my family stayed in the same city instead of moving 30 miles away when I was in elementary school."
10. "I often think about how the decisions we make, no matter how small, throughout the day can change the course of one’s life. I don’t believe in fate, or 'god’s will' or anything like that, but I think about how someone deciding to do something spontaneous puts them on a path to get into an accident, meet someone new, get a new opportunity, or even experience a near miss of something bad happening to them because they went somewhere else."
11. "I very often have the thought, what if I'm actually in a coma and the life I'm living is all just a dream."
12. "I had this thought once and it's continued to bother me ever since — If you had another set of eyes, like on the back of your head or the end of your fingers, where would the second visual image display in your brain? Next to the other one, like split-screen, or would all the visual input feed to the same place, in a sort of confusing blur? Or would it be another arrangement entirely?"
13. "A few years ago I was wondering when it was that the world population finally reached 1 billion. As it turns out, it was sometime in the 1800s — but then by 1900 there was just under 2 billion people. Now we’re fast approaching 8 billion. That is an unsustainable trajectory, and it just makes me think about how effed we are."
14. "Why don’t we pronounce 'breakfast' as 'brakefast'? It would make more sense."
15. "I've thought before that, if God has said that everything he made was perfect, but then it's also believed that no one is perfect; then imperfection must be perfection in the eyes of God. That thought has really helped me learn not to sweat the small stuff."
16. "I’ve always wondered what happens to your consciousness when you die. It doesn't make sense to me that it would just poof into thin air and not exist anymore. Is there a heaven, or is that really just a religious belief? It really confuses me."
17. "I sometimes think about how the afterlife is supposed to go on forever and ever and ever. How can there be no end? Where does all that time go? Or if it’s not a forever thing, where will my soul go when I die? Where will my conscious go? It really freaks me out!"
18. "Why is it that when you try to think of interesting things, you never can! The most notable and interesting things come to you in a daze, never on purpose."
19. "These kinds of thoughts change significantly as you age. Now that I'm looking at the end game of life, I think I've figured out the meaning of it — accomplish something that will make a real improvement in someone's life."
Note: Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.