Justin Bieber



As the undisputed No. 1 teen pop sensation in the world, I have become something of a fulcrum upon which the extremes of human emotion pivot. On one side, you have people who have vaunted me to such lofty heights it is tantamount to deification; on the other, my high-spirited song-and-dance routines elicit an almost murderous rage. But, I ask, when viewed within the context of the geologic timescale, wherein chronological development is measured by evolutionary and stratigraphic events over countless eons rather than transitory human experience, what does any of it truly matter?


Quite simply put, it doesn't. Your adoration or loathing of me, a 17-year-old entertainer from Canada, is no more significant than a grain of sand on a beach, disappearing when Earth's mighty oceans rise and then retreat—as they will hundreds of thousands of millions of times until the sun is extinguished and the pyramids, the Taj Mahal, Rick Ross, the Great Wall of China, and everything else even remotely related to our feeble, fleeting species are but forgotten whispers in one planet's geochronology.

Ask yourself: What then will all your hyperbolic reverence or vitriolic bile even mean? To what do your hours spent online fawning over or vilifying me because of my Grammy performance amount when compared to a recent scientific finding that, as the Pacific and North American tectonic plates collide, the mountains north of Los Angeles will, over the next 100 million years, grow to peaks higher than the Himalayas, only to be eroded down to pebbles by millennia of wind and rain?


Forgive me. But please don't think that because of my fame I place myself above the futile scrabbling of mankind and its ephemeral perception of me as being either "adorable" or "the worst"; quite the contrary. In fact, it is because of my celebrity that I know I matter no more or less than any other human being among the many billions living or dead. When I tweet about the fact that I have cut my iconic hair and it is re-tweeted 300,000 times in a day, there is no better juxtaposition than to place that trifling 24 hours against the 10,000 years it will take Byrd Glacier to move across Antarctica's vast expanses of silent white.

In many ways, grasping the infinitesimal speck humanity constitutes is a source of great comfort. Even while I am in the midst of recording vocals in the studio or appearing on a daytime television program, it is admittedly seductive to stop for a moment and stare unblinking into the void and consider that, in terms of the ever-widening parabola made by the imperceptible slowing of Earth's axis, soon everything—this planet, the moon, myself, the Milky Way galaxy, Usher, and all of your pointless mooning and disdain—will be forever silenced by the unstoppable spiral into total entropy.


Even the faintest memory of my dear, sweet friend Ellen DeGeneres will be swallowed by the cataclysmic crush of all matter collapsing in on itself.

I suppose we've come to the point where we should just plainly state the ugly truth of all this: If you expend any energy at all either obsessively doting on me or hating me with the very fiber of your being, then I'm sad to say you are squandering your brief window as a cognizant being in this universe. Unfortunately, I cannot tell you how better to use your comically tiny duration of sentience. Perhaps tell your family you love them; ponder the intricate beauty of a dew-flecked spiderweb; listen to Nicki Minaj's very good studio debut Pink Friday. In the end, however, none of these things will matter all that much either, not in the great and widening chasm of geological time—let alone when one considers the age of the cosmos from which it has sprung. But maybe in these ways you can draw a brief moment of respite from the existential dread. Ultimately, I believe that this is all one can reasonably hope for.


There is no God.

Justin Bieber's new smash-hit concert film Never Say Never is now in theaters nationwide!