#16 Living in Two Worlds


 Living in Two Worlds

How I learned to live with both love and science, meaning and indifference


Living in Two Worlds

We live in two worlds. One is the world of love, warmth, and human connection. The other is the world of science, where life is explained by forces indifferent to us, where death is inevitable and final.

For much of my life, I could not reconcile these two worlds. They seemed like contradictions—one full of meaning and belonging, the other stripped of comfort, exposing a cold truth.

The Struggle to Reconcile

In my twenties, I lived with this tension uneasily. I wanted to believe in the human world alone, where love and hope make sense of existence. But I could not ignore the other world—the scientific one—that spoke in the language of atoms, entropy, and death. To hold both at once felt unbearable.

A Turning Point

After becoming a parent, something shifted. Life became more layered, more complex. My children were living proof of the warmth of one world, and at the same time, the product of biological processes described by the other. Somehow, I began to accept both.

That did not make death any easier to face. It remains as stark in the human world as it is in the scientific one. But I came to see that both worlds are true—and that to live fully, I could not deny either.

Learning to Move Between Worlds

How do I move comfortably from one world to the other? I do not know. It is less a matter of mastery than of surrender. I accept that both belong to me, even though they do not align.

I often think of Jesus’s words: “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s.” Perhaps living in two worlds means learning to render what belongs to each, without demanding they be the same.

Living in Tension

To live in two worlds is not to resolve their contradiction, but to carry it with honesty. One world gives us love, meaning, and purpose. The other gives us truth, precision, and humility before forces larger than ourselves.

I live in both. But one will have the last word.

This article resonates with themes explored in The Metropolis Organism — a video series examining cities as literal biological systems, where human beings function not as masters, but as necessary organelles in a living urban body.


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