Nothing papers

What do pits, bank-loans and existence have in common?

When you dig a pit in your garden, you also get a pile of dirt next to it. If you can't remove it, the example will remain obvious in your garden. A minus of the terrain surface in the pit must result in a plus of the terrain surface somewhere next to it. If you fill the pit back in, the level is back to zero. If you didn't dig a pit, you didn't change anything in your garden level, if you dug a pit, you changed something. You can 'destroy' this change at any time by filling it up. Well, what's the point of all this, that's obvious. Anyone can imagine digging a hole in the garden, that corresponds to our practical life experience.

Things get a little more abstract with bank or checking loans. The bank creates money out of nothing here. A credit balance, i.e. a plus in the customer's checking account, is offset by a minus in the bank's balance sheet. This is a bit more abstract, we usually don't think about what happens at the bank when it lends us money, but we can understand that too, since it is used thousands of times in practice.

If we think about why something exists at all and not nothing, then we could also imagine that existence in general works in a similar way. A plus in existence on one side in which we live could also result in a kind of minus on another side of existence, so that everything can add up to nothing again. A very abstract idea, but people have always thought about it in creation myths, philosophy or science.