Every year, this date arrives around wrapped in flags, speeches, and fireworks. TV screens replay the same documentaries, the air smells faintly of celebration, and people speak of “freedom” as if it were something you could hold in your hand.
And I wonder: if an alien landed here today, what would they see?
They wouldn’t “find” India or France or Japan. They’d find rivers and mountains, oceans and cities, people laughing, eating, arguing, loving. The borders I grew up learning about would be invisible. The idea of “independence” would mean nothing to them; just a day when humans gather and light explosives for reasons they’d have to ask about.
Because the truth is: borders, nations, even this date; they’re inventions. They don’t exist in the same way gravity or the tides exist. They’re stories we’ve agreed to tell together.
And yet, on this day, millions of us pause. We wave cloth dyed in certain colors. We tell the old stories of struggle. We set off fireworks against the night sky. It is all human-made, the borders, the history, the calendar date itself. None of it is written in the laws of physics.
If I stop there, it’s tempting to say: So why care? The universe is indifferent. The stars burn the same way today as they did yesterday. Nature does not mark this day.
But here’s the thing; almost everything worth caring about is human made. Love, music, friendship, justice, language. All of them are inventions, fragile threads we spin out of nothing. And yet, they are what make life feel worth living.
Camus called this the absurd (our craving for meaning in a silent universe) and he believed the way forward was not despair, but defiance. To look the meaninglessness in the face and still choose to live fully.
That’s why I care, in my own way. Not out of blind nationalism, but because I respect the human act of creation. The courage to say, this day matters, even when the stars do not. I care for the stories we pass on, the moments of connection, the chance to gather in a world that rarely stops.
An alien might never understand Independence Day. But maybe it would see the fireworks, the music, the people holding hands and it would realize something extraordinary: that in the vast indifference of the universe, humans have learned to make their own light.
And perhaps that is the most human thing of all.