The universe might be an infinite ocean of possibilities and events, but we humans are still stellar babies. I mull over this most times I gaze at the wondrous spectacle that is the night sky — which I do quite often. Of the trillions and trillions of stars out there, the vast we see with the unaided eye is still only the tiniest fraction of them. And tonight, while basking in the warm corpses of these stars, I found myself contemplating nothing at all.

"No shit," I can hear you grumbling. "If you were thinking about nothing, then what will this entry be about?" Well, 'nothing.' Still don't get it? Goddammit. Alright. Listen closely this time. I'm not writing about nothing. I'm writing about the concept of nothing. Nothingness. Let's make it a proper noun, always capitalizing its first letter: Nothing. This will make the challenging task a lot easier, as well as consistently remind you of how all languages are essentially made up anyway. Classic Nightcap style. Grab your fucking nightcap drink (ha!) and get comfortable on that toilet seat. Let's have some spooky fun! 

Nothing has been one of those concepts keeping me awake at night. I have thought about writing about it for a while now, and as with any writer worth their salt, anytime I sit to write, my inner voice begins to bully me and pushes me to question my sanity. 'What do you aim for with this article, you coon?' it would ask. (Don't ask why my inner voice is racist?) Are you trying to define or conceptualize it? That's an impossible feat y'know. Invite the reader to ponder on empty philosophical ramblings devoid of any objective value? Or do you drive some sick pleasure in confusing your honest audience? And are you really delusional about your lack of authorial direction here? Ohh, you're trying to convince strangers of how smart you think you are. I get it. I honestly respect that, man. 

My inner unnamed voice is right. Oftentimes I write Nightcap entries, I have no clear sense of what I want to achieve. I want to believe they are more than philosophical ramblings, else all the emails and DMs I receive from some of you beautiful people about how mind-bendingly well my musings resonate with how you view the world would be for nothing. But let's leave the meta commentary for another day. 

This time, and to the dismay of this same voice trying to get me to unalive myself — or relief, depending on how you look at it — I didn't leave my thoughts on the matter of nothingness to dissolve into itself. So what's Nothing?

First off, many things in our minds are anything but material; our emotions, for instance; several others we can perceive but are too slimy to grasp — what in yellow is its yellowness? — but Nothing takes absurdity to an entirely new level. The notion that Nothing is the absence of something ascribes a property of absenteeism to it. And if it can be propertized, then it is already something. Hell, even talking about whether Nothing should accept or reject propertization doesn't really make sense, does it? It's apples and oranges. It's Biden and words.  

Is Nothing (noun) nothing (adjective) then? Yes and no. If Nothing is nothing, then its absence is everything, sure. In any case, to say so would be to associate Nothing (noun) — which is our subject in question — with an adjective, giving the former a semblance of being.

What if we keep reducing the size of something? Eventually, that thing would disappear and leave us with Nothing, right? Well, sizes only get smaller depending on your point of view. Something might be so small that it is practically beyond perceptible to us humans, but its realm is still huge and vast to the observer residing in the corresponding microcosm. 

How about before we're born? Surely we were Nowhere. And it was Nothing everywhere, all the time — if the concept of time even exists in that sense — wouldn't you say? Jackpot! Hold your horses, friend. That was still the potential of our existence. It couldn't have been Nothing because here we are: living, breathing, tweeting gay jokes, and waiting for the new Black Panther movie. And this is forgoing the fact that you technically lived in your Dad's scrotum and in his dad's ballsack before him and on and on. 

It is very strange, I agree — not the ball thingy. In an attempt to elaborate, it is almost impossible not to contradict myself, quite possibly without even knowing I did. I would involuntarily make a lot of illogical assumptions, many internalized and influenced by my worldview. Come to think of it, I kinda have to. Nightcap was born to give you that vantage point, for regardless of how I frame it, every entry you read had to pass through the gateway that is my thought process. It's a wonder I don't write erotica. Anyway, I digress. If I were to write a whole book on Nothing, I wouldn't be able to adequately cover the subject. Nothing I do can change that. Right, fellas? Get it? I'm not sorry.

Naturally, we can then posit that absolute Nothingness isn't possible. That it doesn't and can't exist. Nothing need to be unable to exist for everything to exist. It can't be for everything else to be. And since everything is, Nothing isn't. This is a brave move by a species that knows so little that it almost doesn't matter. (I'm talking to you, human!) But to even entertain the thought of non-existence is to allow Nothing to be… nonexistent. See how we already lost this battle before we even started?

All through the years, people resorted to deploying various ways to address this issue. The first obvious candidate: mathematics. Fucking nerds, amirite? Without getting too technical — no, it isn't because I'm dumb — we must first accept that zero doesn't solve the issue. To begin with, zero isn't Nothing. Among other things, zero has a numerical value and position of 0 on the cardinal plane. Remember the number line? Do you see it now? Surely there must be some sort of equation that explains what Nothing is. Ahh. But however threatening that equation looks, it would be an equation explaining Nothing — not Nothing itself. That was almost too easy.

Leucippus, the pre-Socratic philosopher credited with first developing the theory that everything in the universe is composed of tiny "indivisible" particles called atoms, tried to appeal to the argument of Nothingness with a technical-science-meets-philosophy approach. He went on to suggest that if plenum is an entity completely filled with matter, anti-plenum must exist else there won't be motion — well, he didn't actually call it "anti-plenum" but you get the point. In a world that has a better understanding of motion, matter, and what happens at the atomic level, it is quite simple to see how absurd this is. The British logician Bertrand Russell has since decimated Leucippus's argument in his book History of Western Philosophy. Without getting off topic, this isn't to say that Leucippus's contribution to this discussion is horseshit. In fact, Leucippus is regarded by many as the first to say that "nothing" — this anti-plenum of sorts — may be real without a body. 

Plato reported Socrates saying "all I know is that I know nothing," and although a bit off our context here, that only makes it more paradoxical, wouldn't you say? 

Sighs. Okay. How about aether? It has been described as the cosmic stuff that never was, the soul of the world, the indescribable material that fills the region of the universe beyond the terrestrial sphere. Oh you're getting excited? Albert Michaelson and Edward Morley's experiment in 1887 yielded results that vindicated aether's existence altogether. 

Eastern philosophy has a seemingly positive relationship with Nothing. In some forms of Buddhism, Śūnyatā is considered to be a state of mind that can be achieved when one isn't thinking in a conscious state (but alive! Jesus Christ the dark mind on this one!). The Kyoto School argues that being is Nothingness manifesting itself, deflecting from making any claim about Nothing. Maybe we can only think of Nothing in terms of what it isn't.

Indian philosopher Nagarjuna would urge us to view the impossibility of this feat as simply a fundamental metaphysical error. The influential Tibetan philosopher Je Tsongkhapa would caution against using negations to arrive at what Nothing is, since that would lead to Nothing swallowing even itself. 

Of course, we are probably looking at all this the wrong way. Our ability to comprehend is limited by the available languages we have to express our thoughts. Human languages are limited when it comes to conveying bizarre concepts. Tracing its ancestry, it is clear that it wasn't initially meant for heavy ontological discourse. We usually turn to the peculiarity of mathematics to express and make sense of such complexities in the universe — which has served us well so far — but, as established, even that seems to have been found wanting this time. 

"Why is there anything instead of nothing?" One thing I'm sure of is that, having compiled this entry, I'll never look at that question the same way again. But then if there was Nothing, there won't be anything to think about all this. Thus, I absolutely adore Carl Sagan's sentiment: We are a way for the universe to know itself. That's enough for me.

Is this all for nothing then? Why bother thinking about something as elusive as Nothing? Agreed. There are many philosophers who hold the same view. If not for concepts like this, however, why bother gazing at the night sky? I consider myself a bit of a nihilist — especially when I am broke — but thinking about topics like Nothing makes this whole ride a lot more interesting. The English philosopher likened the deep sky to “of all visual impressions, the nearest akin to a feeling.”

For millennia, our ancestors have gazed into the same starry night and made up imaginative stories: from a cupbearer that was given eternal youth to some goddess shooting her breast milk across the sky. We may have flattened a lot of what those people believe to be the truest about reality and the future generation would likely do the same to us. Nevertheless, maybe this is how we eventually mature on a cosmic scale: by thinking about complex unknowables like Nothing.

What is Nothing? Why are the things shrouded in it — those inaccessible monstrosities behind every nook of our divide — so powerful in dictating our morality and how we live our lives or how to relate with others? We probably failed the minute we named this intriguing concept. And that is probably the point.