Life is a strange thing. It’s also difficult. It’s easy to get mired in your own circumstances and to forget the countless billions of others raveled in their own simultaneous experiences: their own searches for meaning, each life with a gravitas all its own.
In this predicament of self-centered isolation, we often utilize cold rationality and logic as a means of balance, canceling out our emotions to level the playing field. In modern life, emotions can be seen as baggage, as a detriment. Emphasis is placed on calmness and coolness, on emotional processing and awareness, and a consciousness that is transcendental above it.
Few people truly achieve this. Most are swimming in the sewage of their emotions, in a cesspool of traumas they can only marginally keep their necks above.
One certainty about life is that there is no one universal answer. There are many answers, and many truths, but no one truth can rear its head and proclaim absolution. People try, and they do so with all the might of their egoic jurisprudence, but try as they might, they are simply defending one facet of life, one way of being.
Life does not have to have any meaning. In fact, it can be quite freeing to view it as meaningless. It is quite beautiful when you allow each moment to have its own meaning: fleeting, ephemeral, yet equally significant.
In the contemplation of life with cold-hearted rationality, one must necessarily ask the question of whether it makes sense to live out their life: in a purely resource-driven sense, human lives consume resources at the cost of other life-forms on the planet. Our every human life has a carbon footprint that is not-neutral; our every experience in life has a toll on the planet.
From this resource-scarce mindset, humans can be rather vicious to one another. Especially driven by selfish and egocentric worldviews, the game of life can be reduced to a calculating game: take more from others than you give. Societal interactions can be viewed as schemes to ensure one’s own survival and genetic continuity. Many of us play this game as adults.
Even those of us who do not play can be described as playing the game, albeit on naive or non-optimal terms. Mathematically, we can derive rules for optimal cooperation based on game theory and other principles.
I skirt around a fairly delicate topic as I say all this, without knowing how many minds and readers lie at the awaiting end of my words. Perhaps my words will be forgotten, but there is always that infinitesimal chance they will be heard and resounded.
In a purely economic and actuarial sense, every human life does have value, in terms of currency and taxes. In an emotional sense, every human life has an impact. No matter the philosophy or religion, we extoll the virtues of living. But let us not forget that death and sacrifice too have meaning and value and worth in this grand calculus.
I know not to what end I make these contemplations, simply that the meaning and weight of life holds an inescapable fascination. On one hand, I can ascribe no meaning to existence, no point to it: it is a futile game, wrought with tremendous suffering. On the other hand, it is a beautiful game, wrought with tremendous meaning. Neither hand holds the answer all on its own, but in balance, they seem to amount to something more than the weight of each.
How peculiar a thing, is all I can say – and all I can do is point it out, with a careful assortment of verbiage. And yet, in today’s day and age, in which information is commonplace, but intelligence is increasingly rare, how worthless it is to point it out. I describe nothing new, simply giving coinage to a new set of words to describe age-old puzzles which have spawned countless dogmas.
I am hungry and I wish I were dead. I am beyond emotion and all feeling for this thing called life, and yet, because of that, I can see it as a purely beautiful thing. There is nothing worth pursuing, no experience I care for, and yet I am embracing of all of it. Countless people will read this and scoff defiance, clinging to their own vain tether of hope and meaning, and I will encourage them to do so. But I will not cease to say that it is vanity by which you ascribe meaning to something so beyond your ability to fathom. Yet, I will not say it is is truly beyond your ability to fathom, for you are conscious; but most people are closed-minded, and therefore, they live with myopic blinders, oblivious to the true beauty of it all.
All I can do is point this out, callously and equally vainly, coldly and rationally, with the hope that a few might eventually get what I mean, while the rest call me insane.
I know the truth: to live is an insane thing.
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