I will always remember the excitement I felt when I first heard that scientists were progressing toward a “Theory of Everything”. My initial elation at the time emerged from my naïve belief that this meant science was closing in on objective solutions to our greatest existential mysteries such as, why there is something rather than nothing, and why there is evil and suffering in the world. This short-lived joy reflected my hope that physicists were on the verge of rationally explaining our existential origin, intrinsic purpose, and ultimate destiny.

You can imagine my deflation when I read further and discovered that the actual object of this ultimate scientific pursuit was a theory that could unify the existing theories of quantum mechanics and relativity. While I was not a specialist in these theories, I was aware of their explanatory power and existential importance of the fundamental disconnect between them.

Nonetheless, I was palpably disappointed by the limited scope of the physicists’ “Theory of Everything”, and the underlying implication that there probably was not a group of elite scientists collaboratively focused on answering our greatest existential questions. This experience led me to conclude that if I wanted these answers, I would have to find them myself, which intensified my latent aspiration to write A Concise Theory of Truly Everything, and provided its title.

From almost as far back as I can remember I have been aware of the fundamental mysteries surrounding our existential origin, intrinsic purpose, and ultimate destiny. Initially, I was certain that I was the only person to whom these were mysteries. I figured everyone else must already have The Answers because they all seemed to live their lives undistracted by the existential ignorance behind the deepest, most persistent itch within my young mind. Consequently, for much of my youth I actively tried to hide the fact that I did not have The Answers, driven by my childish fear of the ridicule I was certain would ensue if my peers ever discovered my singularly unenlightened state.

Over the course of my teens and into early adulthood, I searched libraries, bookstores, and presentations in lecture halls for these Answers. Eventually, it became evident to me that the majority of us simply do not have access to rational answers to our most fundamental questions that would alleviate our existential angst. That realization became the driving force behind my book, written for the open-minded child at the heart of the skeptics still searching for rational answers to our greatest existential questions.

A Concise Theory of Truly Everything is a work of existential engineering by an outsider philosopher, marginalized by his caste-based identification as an American Untouchable. My path to writing it began with the resurrection of my existential curiosity as a precocious eight year old. By the time I was in high school, I was obsessed with the underlying foundational questions.

However, nothing in the circumstances of my upbringing even hinted at the possibility of pursuing existential engineering as a possible vocational choice. Consequently, my first semi-informed career aspiration was to work for a think tank, which seemed like a logical path for an uncannily bright, societally marginalized person who wanted to solve persistent problems without drawing distracting attention to himself.

Certain factors of my marginalization evolved my viable vocation options into a career as an information technology analyst, developing and supporting software solutions to my employers’ business problems. However, throughout my professional life my personal preoccupation with existential questions continued to grow.

The outwardly magical ease with which I solved problems brought to my attention, led me to conclude that with the appropriate contextual knowledge, no problem is unsolvable, and no question is unanswerable. Accordingly, I set out on what appeared to be a quixotic quest to accumulate the requisite knowledge of our existential context to engineer answers to our most fundamental questions. This book represents the rational summary of my seemingly improbable success.

While the basis of this book is mainstream philosophical, scientific, and spiritual knowledge, my outsider status, and the demands of my day job, limited the breadth of my exposure to these schools of existential thought. Throughout my autodidactic research, I maintained a laser-tight focus on finding the boundaries of these existential disciplines, in order to reveal the fundamental questions, that no one of them could rationally answer, but a combination of them might.

My guiding principle was that there must be a logical consistency throughout reality that will require any resulting insights to be rational. What emerged was undeniably heterodoxical but not necessarily heretical.

A consequence of my narrow focus is my lack of awareness of other existential researchers who may have come to similar conclusions. Accordingly, rather than searching for potential collaborators along the way, I originally added a subtitle that “stays in my lane” by describing what this book embodies in the context of my societal identifier. The final subtitle reflects my personal conclusion that my existential insights are fit to leave my existential ghetto.

To say A Concise Theory of Truly Everything was a difficult book to write would be an absurd understatement. Over the course of my efforts to research, analyze, and integrate the disparate, complex sources of our existential knowledge, new insights emerged that had to be incorporated into this framework. The more foundational this new knowledge was, the more of the framework had to be reworked to accommodate it. On top of that, I had to find a level of abstraction from which to explain virtually everything, to every open-minded person whose existential curiosity is sufficient to entitle them to these Answers.

This was an essentially impossible task, and so there will be professionals in the various fields I am syncretizing, who will insist that I am oversimplifying key concepts; while at the same time, there will be amateurs, who will contend that I am talking over their heads. Although both constituencies would have valid arguments supporting their positions, I make no apologies since accommodating either group would further alienate the other. The level of abstraction I settled upon here resonated with me, after a long career spent conveying specialist knowledge to non-specialists.