That’s what our existence is
We humans are naturally self-centered. Most of us tend to think of ourselves as we are now, at this time in our lives. We may feel happy or sad, and we may feel isolated and lonely, or stressed by connections with other people. Things in our lives may be changing slowly or rapidly, because of events over which we have a little or a lot of control. We tend to think of existence mainly from our own point of view, as somehow separate, unitary souls.
To understand our lives better it can help to realize that we, along with everything else in the universe, exist in and consist of temporary balances of networks of competing forces. Rather than being unitary souls, we exist as and in amazingly complex webs.
Physicists tell us that everything in the universe is governed by four fundamental forces: the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, the electromagnetic force, and the gravitational force. Most of them are attractive forces, acting to keep things together. The strong and weak nuclear forces bind the nuclei of atoms together, and the gravitational force or field, finds massive objects to each other. (The foregoing description is a bit outdated, in that physicists now prefer to talk about “fields” rather than “forces”, and they have refined their models to include sub-nuclear…
