..
This is the answer to all life’s questions and the meaning of life. You
took the red pill and thought to yourself, maybe actors aren’t the moral
arbiters or the shaman of our time. But that’s the start. What is there at the end of the
rabbit hole, the very end of that long, winding, and darkened road. Let’s say
at the end of everything there is a room toward the back with a wall
of black static, or a well that echoes infinitely, where you will never
hear your coin drop nor have its wish come true. It’s an abyss where as Frederick Nietzsche stated, if you gaze into it long enough it will gaze back into you.
You have some trepidation about
approaching the void, touching it, putting on the godhead and
experiencing its infinite wisdom. Is it a black hole, is it
enlightenment, do you become God herself? Philosophically, it must
exist... an answer.
You wondered how it all began.
“Maybe it always was.”
You ask the purpose.
“There isn’t one.”
You ask the meaning.
“But that’s a matter of perception and you are to ascribe your own.”
Is it God?
“No, nor would it matter.”
Then why?
“Why not.”
“So what should I do?” you think.
You
go back to the best words ever written: “I think, therefore I am.” These
are the words that define consciousness. It’s how you are aware you’re
alive. It’s how you were able to contemplate your own existence. And
what better way to contemplate your existence than to consider it in light of its opposite. Life is brought into contrast by its opposite of death. The only question philosophers Albert Camus and Alan Watts believed important to ask
is whether one should live or not live. Or as an oversimplification of
Camus puts it, the choice between suicide and having a cup of coffee. This is the ground floor of the nature of reality. Those reading this are enjoying their existential cup of coffee. If
life is a good thing, you’re healthy enough to enjoy contemplating it.
If it’s a bad thing, you’re deranged and distracted enough to read these
words instead of a more noble pursuit like jumping off your local water
tower.
Why
So you’re alive. You currently inclined to live and to
stay alive for the immediate future. Not only that, as we have
established, you are conscious. Lucky you. Then the next question you
might have is how to live. But what causes consciousness to operate.
That relates to
why you are. That brings up the question of free will.
Are your actions your own or are they predetermined? Nature and nurture
come to mind first. Biological
nature is deterministic to some degree.
If you have blue eyes, or red hair, or black skin, or you’re 5’11”.
Genetic predisposition to certain behaviors have been shown to exist.
You can inherit behavioral modifiers such as sleeping habits, addictive
behavior, or mental illness. And maybe this makes sense. We often
separate body and mind. But the mind is the brain, a physical part of
the body to be formed through genetic happenings like the rest of you, and if your parents have some defect perhaps that is encoded within you
through the replication involved in biological reproduction. If this is a
hard sell, consider someone with a fear of heights or snakes. The
nerves of those instincts are predetermined and point to a wide
implication of genetic influence over behavior. The other aspect of who
you become is
nurture, where you are a product of your environment. So
far as we know, we are born without choosing our environment, our
parents or lack thereof, or our surroundings. Our experiences are very
much shaped by all the people around us and the inventions and actions
of people the world over. The free will question may never be answered
definitively, but keeping this perspective on nature and nurture in
mind, we can deduce our actions are in the least highly influenced by
our environment and our genetics.
What I’m trying to say is if
you were born into an Aboriginal tribe in Australia, it seems very
unlikely you would end up in a life trajectory that closely resembled
that of Amanda Bynes, and that’s probably a good thing. If you were
raised by militants to be a child soldier from birth and taught all the
world’s problems were because of a particular race of people, it seems
to reason that sort of conditioning is not easily overcome. Genetics and
the influence of other people hold a big part in how someone sees the
world. You may see yourself as individualistic, and believe even that in
same position as a child you would think for yourself, put down the
gun, and reject evil. But this would assume figuring how to live wouldn’t be predicated on the foremost instinct which is survival. This
comes before you can even have that cup of coffee and contemplate the
validity of life at your school’s
Think For Yourself workshop. You must ensure
your survival, and here you are a young child soldier holding a
Kalashnikov rifle and all you know are your elders were smart enough to
survive thus far, taught you to apply Band-Aids, and now they’re
telling you that the Jews are a huge existential threat. Now if you kept
that same child in a single room from birth and only showed him
Harry
Potter films and told him they were documentaries, it wouldn’t be
unreasonable for him to believe wizards exist. And this applies to people’s belief in gods, absurd conspiracies, or generally
anything where evidence is absent. Sometimes misguided beliefs have dire consequences. This implicates it’s counterproductive and wrong to blame the wrong. This isn’t to say doing wrong should be absolved,
rather understood.
“Everything people talk about with regard to magic is absolutely true, as long as you understand it is happening inside people’s minds.”
Alan Moore
How
The other
driving force in the how people live is their basic necessities. That is
simple. Food, water, sleep, and safety. The rest are conveniences. But
as a conscious person, are there social and mental needs? You don’t need
to reproduce to live. You don’t need socialization to exist. You don’t
even need to be mentally sound to be alive if you are in safe
circumstances... such as a mental asylum. From the nurture perspective,
infants are said to die without physical nourishment, though I’m not
sure who would conduct such an experiment. After their infancy humans are
capable of being emotionally self-sufficient, although stressors of
social isolation certainly have a negative impact without some proper
form of stimulation. There is also the questions of how well humans
could survive alone without the comforts of human invention and
entertainment, as its easier to pass the time with electricity, books, and music. Safety could mean shelter or clothing to protect from the
elements, what keeps your body functioning, or anything that would
impede your ability to get fed. Still, it raises an important question.
As a mentally sound, physically healthy, conscious person on an infinite
timeline, in a safe, stresser-free environment, with limitless food,
water, and sleep, what would be the motive to do anything after
breakfast? After accounting for the obligations and social relations unique to your life, the only answer is boredom. That is the burden of the
conscious mind. The baseline for its alleviation is thought. That is the
same need for stimulation spoken of before. Maybe you wake up in the
morning and you don’t yet have thirst or hunger, or maybe you do: “I am
awake. I think, therefore I am. Should I kill myself or have a cup of
coffee?” Boredom is the one disease there is no cure for. It is only
placated and sustained in the long-term by novelty. It wants an
infinite wave of things to see, sense, hear, taste, smell, consider, or
otherwise experience. I believe the motivator of boredom is another key
to understanding human behavior.
Sigmund Freud coined the
pleasure principle which generally described people as moving toward
pleasure and away from pain. It’s easy to think of counter-examples when
you consider why people trek Everest or suspend their bodies from
piercing hooks. But this is too can be described and dismissed by a less
precise and understood pain known as psychic pain. Most people are
familiar with the many types of psychic pain. There’s sadness, anger,
frustration, humiliation. There’s a pain in anxiety and feelings of futility. There’s a pain of not knowing and even a pain
in knowing. The person at the foot of the mountain may be driven by a lack of accomplishment. The person pierced by hooks may be driven to overcome their fear of physical pain. Boredom is the ever-present and most benign psychic pain.
Again it’s alleviated only by thought, or distraction, or that other
survival essential: the mystery that is sleep. A more extreme form might be the kind which drives a person to a career of physically-risky deadly stunts
over a more safe but potentially more psychically distressing dead-end
job.
Now that the essentials of survival have been described,
what could go wrong and how they interplay needs to be examined, because
those factors can influence how you live. Your need to eat can be
challenged by scarcity of animals or crops. Your need to drink is
predicated on access to fresh water. Both can lead to difficulties if
you are competing for food or water with other people or tribes. You can
guess your safety is going to be compromised, which it is already by
your need for shelter and clothing to protect you from the elements.
Even doing nothing can challenge your physical health by putting it into
a state of entropy. You need a sound mind to navigate this to avoid
injury or illness and ensure your survival. You have a lot of work cut
out for you often times, depending on how you fare in the birth lottery,
before you even have the privilege of the great luxury of thought
that is as boredom. So imagine you are in a pre-civilized environment
where food is scarce, and the locations for freshwater are rare and
contested by others, with volatile elements that trade between frigid
cold and smoldering heat, where the threat of death looms from other
people, wild animals, and invisible infectious disease. How you behave
under these conditions may be affected. In light of survival in some
situations, notions of good or evil and right and wrong may become
secondary or superfluous considerations. Of course in Western societies,
today the equivalent might be a retail stampede on Black Friday where
two people barely removed genetically from bonobos fight over a
discounted coffeemaker. The reality of the scarcity is different, the
survival instinct is the same.
It seems many people consider
themselves distinct from cavemen and the animals they’re ancestors of.
Perhaps at our best we are comparatively as gods in what we can
accomplish. We have people who can create the general theory of
relativity and then we have people who marry their cousins. To my point,
Einstein did both. We elevate ourselves above animals for inventions
like nuclear energy with the potential to aid and sustain life, while
ignoring the dangerous by-products of this supposed progress like
nuclear weapons that threaten to end all life. We champion modern lives of
separation, relative containment, social sterility, and mental
illness over the tried and tested archetypal environments of
tightly-knit, self-sufficient communities. We take pride in dominion
over the animal kingdom when we don’t have dominion over ourselves.
We’re the only animal species so far threatening the planet’s
habitability through the misuse of chemical elements or the destruction
of the atmosphere. And that’s not a stance on either nuclear weaponry
nor climate change, rather a critique of our meddling and experimentation in those
fields when the growth in our ability to reason is far outweighed by our
growth in increasingly unwieldy technology.
“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.”
Edward O. Wilson
Choice
Again
under the presumption of free will, your behavior is further curtailed
by social pressures and customs. Your rights end where another’s begin. This could range from personal harm to the view of a skyline from your patio window. They are cultivated by legal ramifications. What you say or do can get
you fired and hence cost you the ability to provide you and your dependents with basic necessities. This is all being said in service of the
idea that if free will exists, at best, it has enormous caveats. Your
behavior is not wholly your own. Even the freest man is subject to
circumstances beyond his control. The hobbies and interests you hold generally are born of things that came before: from cars to
careers, to the language and oil paints you use to express your rugged
individualism.
The most essential determining factor in how
people live can be reduced to binary. What’s being alluded to is
choices. You can weigh the ins-and-outs of choices indefinitely, and
sometimes you are chosen for by inaction. Decisions are generally
brought on by the aforementioned pleasure principle and how it relates to a
personal cost-benefit analysis. Many assume morality plays a big role in
the decision-making process. This sounds true enough. But there’s more
to consider here. Certainly there are circumstances which would lead a
person to do things immoral because of considerations out of their
control. A simple example is a lack of education. If you
lack an education you might connect dots and force correlations that
don’t fit, as a stopgap measure may be preferable to nothing. It could
be something as simple as not trusting the powerful, or as complex as
believing in a god-like entity who is greater than yourself. This
missing, incomplete, or completely misguided information could lead to
wrong or immoral decisions.
“A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.”
Hunter S. Thompson
But why would someone have an inclination toward good, anyway? Perhaps
your inclination is the result of living in a bubble. You were raised in
a healthy society by loving parents and you found people to be
generally agreeable and kind and trustworthy, so your environment caused
you to respond in a way that was reciprocal and mutually rewarding. Now
imagine you are the child soldier born into a war-torn country, with
the menace of invisible drones raining destruction, where survival is
day-to-day, and theft, deceit, animosity and violence are the
generally accepted forms of social exchange. If you experience
predominantly pain and despair, to you the idea of generosity and
morality may seem like a foreign concept or a sick joke. This is the
inverse view of the way of the cooperative world, where people of peace are weak victims
ready for the taking, and anyone kind is naive, gullible, and delusional. In
the societies that operate this way misbehavior is good behavior, and
it is not reprimanded but rewarded.
There seems to be a
misguided notion of an innate human propensity to love or do good, where in a
world without scarcity of survival mechanisms there is no motive
for conflict. I would argue this would still not be the case, as conflict would occur for the sake of novelty if nothing else. People get
along in large part as a function of self-preservation. If you rock the
boat, you yourself might get knocked overboard. Self-preservation is
often conflated with some innate camaraderie among men. It is a
function of survival and safety. There are certainly clear distinctions
between what is moral and what is immoral and how those words are taken
and examined. What is yet to be seen is whether this matters. As a
person raised in a loving environment and kind society, with enough free
time to contemplate the grand implications of my actions, immoral
behavior is revolting. Had I been raised in a society where human life
was not valued however, or brainwashed by extremists, I could see myself
as the nihilistic child soldier shooting indiscriminately and
dispassionately. Imagine going up to the child who has suffered the loss
of family and friends, who has seen unspeakable horror and the
destruction of his community, who has been taught to hate “the other”
since as long as he could comprehend, where no kind of future exists,
and saying, “Just do good and good things will come.” It sounds almost
sadistic. Hope and good are not part of vocabulary of the dispossessed.
For some who have lived a horrible reality most couldn’t imagine,
physically and psychically, who’s to say rehabilitation is even possible.
Of course there’s a massive distinction between
right and wrong. Right means to end wrongs. The problem occurs in
defining what is right and what is wrong. One could argue, all life
invariably leads to suffering, and therefore the moral and just thing to
do is to end it and promote the destruction of all life by any means
necessary. It’s probable humankind inevitably finds its way to another genocide, famine, or ecological ruin. Is that worth it so you
can scroll YouTube comments and listen to the Taylor Swift in the interim? Possibly, but who’s to say. Maybe the right thing is to listen to those
television shows we love so much and walk hand-in-hand into one final
midnight. Who’s to say consciousness isn’t a needless nuisance with no
inherent meaning, an interruption to the comparative slumber and guaranteed peace of
nothingness. Now this is taking it dark turn, but you read
the title. This is merely the product of excessive thought and an examination of life in contrast to death, and a contemplation of the potential rational conclusions. It may not be pretty to modern and sophisticated sensibilities. As Albert Camus said, “It is always easy to be logical. It is almost
impossible to be logical to the bitter end.” To not acknowledge the human desire for the end of all things may be the delusional privilege of the fraction of society who dance on the platform the rest of society maintains and carries, if it exists at all.
What do you do when you’ve thought
enough and you find yourself at the end of the abyss, where you find a well and wish
your hopes and dreams upon it and it whispers nothing in return? You
can’t avoid nature. You can’t avoid nurture. Free will as we know it is
dubious at best. All the immoral people you disagree with are all
products of circumstances out of their control. Yes, even Karen. Well,
you should do good whatever the total sum of your upbringing and life
experience have bestowed on you. My answer is more dark, or perhaps more forgiving. I believe people collectively decide. If people want war,
let them have war. How can the combined total
collective life experience of the earth be wrong? How could any one
person have the audacity to hold another person’s life experience as
invalid? But this applies to every individual and the inverse is also
fair. This applies to the proportionate or disproportionate response your actions inspire. If people want peace, let there be peace. All one can do is push
society not in the right direction, but in that direction your life
experience has led you to believe is most acceptable to you and your
personal sense of what’s just, equitable, or simply entertaining. If the moral majority is a silent and inactive majority, unwilling to act in their own interest for social, financial, or safety fears, their effective output remains inline and favorable to their opposition. Some believe their being on “the right side of history” is so self-evident, it’s self-fulfilling and does not require their skin in the game.
Duality
The people who choose coffee over suicide seem to often wonder out loud how to be about their person. They may aim to be their best selves. I’m reminded of the myth of Sisyphus, more importantly its interpretation by Camus, and the only solution sounds fatalistic. You don’t try too hard
and fight the fates life bestowed upon you, and find pleasure through scorn if fate has forsaken you. The fate of Sisyphus was being sentenced to the endless repetition of pushing a boulder up a hill. It echoes of daily life, its basic, simple needs, left with the freedom of thought and freedom from boredom as we cope with our daily burden. Achieving contentment through hell is more a success than inhabiting heaven itself. To quote directly, “The higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks.” Because if Elon Musk is a genius, why
doesn’t he realize all things are ultimately futile and take the enlightened path of sleeping all
day? If we all become capable of space travel it will be awe-inspiring, but inevitably it wouldn’t be impressive anymore, just like airplanes don’t much impress anyone now
as they’ve always been around and they’re omnipresent. Once we crossed the ocean, we wanted outerspace, when we conquer outerspace, we’ll want to see outer-outerspace. Everything
finds an equilibrium. Again, Camus, “One always finds one’s burden again.”
In civil societies those who gravely misbehave are put into
prisons. Ideally, they’re not for punishment, rather to impede their
antisocial behavior so people are safe to pursue their pleasure-seeking
lives unhindered. The health of a society might be most well-judged by
how it treats its criminals. People put into solitary confinement are
said to lose their minds. But if you lose your mind in solitary
confinement, that sounds like a mind that is working properly. You
would be insane to behave normal in such a situation. This scenario
seems to point out in stark contrast the situational and reflexive
nature of the mind. In a sick society, the sane are sick, and in what’s
broken there’s no frame of reference for what’s fixed.
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Another
thing that said about prison is inmates get used to it. If change is
possible, normality is malleable. As people fluctuate between states
they can reach what is a “new normal.” It seems many believe some
achievement can be obtained from which the rest of their life will be
satisfaction. This is false. And in this sense, heaven is another prison you get used
to. How many harps can you listen to before you need a second and a
third, or to reinvent the harp itself? What’s the best buffet in heaven?
How much ecstasy is too much? Is it still heaven if I can’t stand the
color of my neighbor’s cloud? There would be no reason to think, do or
feel in a permanent state of complete satisfaction. Part of what
sustains joy is the endless pursuit. There’s always a new want. A new milestone.
High-minded individuals at their most ambitious claim to want to explore
the stars. When all the planets are inhabited and the stars explored,
there will be a new far-reaching set of things to know and learn. The
most truly remarkable thing we could find as the result of discovery
might also be the most unfortunate, an end.
This all plays into the dynamics of social behavior. There is a pattern.
Author John Gray believes Western Civilization is heavily predicated by
the liberal philosophies of Socrates and Plato, that put forth a faith
that progress will lead to some inevitable virtuous end. He correctly
identifies the myth of progress. Perhaps he understands things don’t
progress so much as they transform, and the conception of what’s
“better” always has trade-offs and is subjective and opaque.
Intelligence and wisdom is framed around rationality. But how do you
gauge what is the intelligent action to take in a reality where
rationality and its counterpart of purpose are thin? For example, even if one wholly
disavows religious belief, it could still be rationally understood and
justified as a meditation, a resignation to the unknowable, without the
delusion of scientific progress that eventually some distinctive answer will be found.
It can’t be denied though that the interplay between what’s
rational and what isn’t creates odd conviction in people. It’s
understood many want what they can’t have. What you can’t have has
intrigue and value. What you know you
can have generally doesn’t have the
satisfaction of anticipation. It speaks to the satisfaction of struggle
and the potency of desire. It speaks to an indifference to destinations,
where instead of means to an end, there’s more value in the means. “The
pursuit of happiness” is an important phrase because it implies there is
no end, and that happiness is in the pursuit. That abstract idea of
happiness could be nothing more than bearing witness between feelings of
hope and despair, that even an endless bout of gains itself could
invariably become unsatisfactory in its grey repetition and lead to a limiting
mental entropy.
In other words, opposing ideas can both be
right. It certainly is apparent in irony, which when done right appears
to evoke the richest response in the human spirit. Progress is a myth
because it implies a singular destination we are to arrive at, because
the narrative fallacy is simpler to understand, our imagined destinies
and lives become a story instead of seeing the world as a system of processes. For what
purpose for your life could there be, brought on by your own belief or
by God, that wouldn’t be completely anti-climatic?
What to do
It
always returns to existence and non-existence, coffee and suicide. Even coffee is bitter. When
weighing the scales how does not one see the futility and give in to the
toxic allure of pessimism and the nihilism? Some suggest that the
proper way to be about the world is to find what you enjoy, become
addicted, immerse yourself totally. To the extent one can shape an honest narrative to life, a
healthy one might be to see it as a playground of experience. If you
have a life of cynicism with a laser focus on the inevitability of loss,
and the death and destruction that comes with it, this position is no
less valid. It exists. Yet all true nihilists are dead. To continue to
exist itself justifies life’s usefulness. The error many make is
confusing a purpose to life with a great purpose to life. The latter
doesn’t exist. But having a meaning to existence is as simple as knowing one
person or thing that still has meaning to you.
Yet all the
meaning in the world doesn’t erase the cognizance of the dichotomy between the appreciation of even the mundane
aspects of life and accepting of the irrationality and ultimate futility of a
continued existence. The ebb and flow between
what is depressive and mania describe the polarities in bipolar disorder. Their likely isn’t a
narrative or a secret to a fulfilling life. Yet if you understand the
polarities you may be more likely to approach it from a place of peace.
By the same token, the true use of wisdom and rationality could be a
full and complete embrace of the irrational. It’s easy to call the
schizophrenic shaman taking drugs in a South America jungle “crazy,” but there’s a
chance he uses the same term to describe an insurance salesman in Iowa
who spends 40 years of his life filing claims.
In addition
to human duality, the companion piece for understanding is the arguably grotesque notion of tolerance. Good and evil, love and hate, are
admittedly words with baggage and of a supernatural quality. While fair
use for expression, they don’t take into account what is, if not a lack
of free will, the completely impressionable nature of human beings and
the permanency of their genetics. This includes an objective understanding of
unwelcome behaviors, as well as the responses to them which might
include incarceration or a disproportionate retaliation. People
isolate those who would do evil unto them or others they care about, ideally
dispassionately. This is not a suggestion, this is what humans do under government. We are tolerant of criminal behavior, in that we have made no preemptive measures to stop it and are forced to accept it. Vengeance is always an option, but that starts a tit-for-tat retribution cycle that only exacerbates, continues, and amplifies harm. It may be helpful to look at all people the same way, with tolerance, understanding their misbehavior in proper context, and meeting it with an aim of justice instead of hostility.
“If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The minds darkest
recesses are illuminated by the terrifying and seldom-used willingness to question. Many go on about freedom and yet
refuse to exercise it in the one place it’s possible: their own minds. Outside, it’s akin to a current, the movement convincing us our actions are useful and unique, but at most contributing to a general sway. If life can be ground to the binary of black and white, people should be understood for their decisions without ceding consequence, whether it’s considered progressive or regressive, mean or kind, whether they are victims of coffee or suicide. In death, one should agree it’s paramount the individual has final say in the sum result of their psychic and physical pain. In life, those with a perceived net-benefit, awareness involves the recognition of duality and extreme contrast, understanding this balancing act is the most fulfilling.
In meaning, whether your inclination is a religious one or not, its hard not to argue religious stories and philosophy as well as myths at the very least began in the spirit of scientific discovery, ways to understand and explain the world and our surroundings. In a world where the more progressive nations are increasingly secular, there is increased confusion and cognitive dissonance. Some would chose to disavow society’s building blocks for what they’ve gotten wrong, or how they’ve decayed, instead of the right impulse, which in most cases is to build upon and reform as needed. But this is all under the pretense that the collective wants what it says it wants. What we truly want is what we stand for with enough tenacity to make into reality, or what we accept through indifference and passivity. What we ultimately decide will be forgiven, forgotten, celebrated, or hated all the same. Although progress is myth, myths have guided us before, and it is most entertaining route thus far.
Myths are comforting, but if you can afford it, in navigating the rabbit hole, the abyss, the pit of self, the heart of darkness, there comes a visceral, renewed appreciation. Its the difference between taking comfort from a system versus knowing how a system works and how to repair it. There is peace even through terror if you understand its machinations. For those who take interest in life, they are served best riding the wave between hope and despair, the rational and irrational. Even a scientifically-inclined mind won’t have a fully crystallized picture of reality without too equal parts engagement and deference to the absurd.
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