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March 21 - May 18, 2023
The universe stares back at us with its stark glare and reminds us how deeply strange and unclear our life really is, even the most simple and normal things.
In truth, no matter what we think we know, we are probably wrong, and no matter what anyone else thinks they know, they are probably wrong. No one knows what’s going on in any fundamental sense. Nothing about this life is simple or clear, and from the perspective of the stars, nothing down here on earth—including us—matters all that much to anything beyond itself.
“Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough,” said renowned theoretical physicist Richard Feynman.
At the base of almost everything, the resulting truth is this: we don’t know. When we disregard this unknowingness, we can easily become disinterested, uninspired, and worn out of this life. We can put great stress on things that perhaps don’t matter all that much and neglect experiences and things that do. We can feel the pressure and anxiety of chasing perfection and certainty, which do not exist.
We should look to the universe often, not solely for answers but for perspective; for a helpful adjustment and an aerial consideration of our daily life.
“Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence,”
We must try to remember as often as we can that the unknown permeates everything. Its wonder is always above us, below us, around us, and inside us, whenever we need it.
Perhaps there is a way through pessimism that leads to an adapted and more reasonable optimism—not the sort of delusional optimism that is ignorant to the somber truths of our condition, but rather, an optimism that exists in spite of it all.
In the dirt of life, it is up to us to plant the seeds, watch the flowers grow, and enjoy their beauty, even in spite of the fact that we know that they will die.
We still know very little of what it means to be a self, let alone a true self, what it means to live or how we ought to, what consciousness is, why there is life or a universe at all, what the ultimate purpose of literally anything and everything is, if there is any truth and how we can know for sure, and the list goes on.
Perhaps there are no ultimate answers in philosophy, perhaps there never will be, but there are no ultimate answers in music, in art, in a beautiful landscape, or in a conversation with a friend, and yet, I know of no one who does not find value, insight, love, and solace in all of these things.
Perhaps what we should and only can do is to try to enjoy the process of playing with the blocks of philosophy like children playing with toy blocks for no reason other than the curiosity and fun of it; not because in the end the blocks will provide something that stays up forever, but because we inevitably will take the blocks down, put them away for a little while, and then play with them again on another day, in a different way.
Central to Taoism is the idea that everything is in a continual state of flux, ceaselessly changing and adapting. Thus, no single idea or thing is to be attached to. Nothing is to be forced in or out of place. All is to be permitted to run its natural course, subject to the one, constant, unchanging truth: everything changes.
Lao Tzu suggests that one can accomplish this by accepting the fluctuation of everything and giving up rigid judgments, attachments, expectations, and our efforts to control our lives. In doing so, one becomes more closely intertwined with the natural order of things, taking on a sort of fluid, intuitive, and harmonious relationship with the natural world.
The First Noble Truth is that life is fundamentally suffering. No matter who or what they are, all living things are bound and connected by this intrinsic existential quality of suffering, in its broadest sense. The Second Noble Truth argues that this suffering is a consequence of our desires and attachments. The third truth, in a revolutionary way of thinking for its time, goes on to claim that since suffering is a product of attachment and desire, one can personally overcome and end suffering by eliminating or recalibrating one’s desires and attachments.
Buddha argued that our external world is in perpetual, unattainable flux, and consequently, so too are we. We are but collections of constantly changing interactions between the world and our thoughts, and thus, the idea of a fixed, independent, identifiable self is a delusion. This is essential to understand because it suggests that the self that we are trying to satisfy, escape, or eternalize never even really exists in the first place. Rather, the capital I that we describe is merely a state of emptiness constantly being filled and emptied by the succession of each moment.
It’s as if we are all swimming or floating down a river in which there are rocks that protrude out of the river’s surface. These rocks represent various things and ideas that might be appealing or seem reasonable to grab a hold of and stop ourselves from going further downriver. However, if we stop to hold onto a rock, we stop moving. The water continues to flow beneath us, but we remain stuck and rigid. Zen suggests that in this, we will begin to experience an increasing pain and suffering that arises from being attached to something and disconnected from the fluid movement of activity
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A human being is a part of the whole, called by us “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true [religiosity]. Not to nourish it but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.
Consciousness is who we are—how we identify ourselves through experience. But consciousness is, when distilled down empirically, a strange, empty awareness, malleably undefined and inexorably connected with everything that makes and interacts with it (and doesn’t).
You are your thoughts and the lineage of every bit of history that they touched to get to you. You are the words you are reading and the mind that is automatically processing them. You are the mind that will forget them in some amount of time. You are everything you’ve heard and perceived. You are everything you’ve never heard or perceived. You are everything you’ve ever hated. You are everything you’ve ever loved. You are what’s inside and what’s outside your mind and your body. And you are none of the above. If you exist, you cannot be free. If there is no you, you cannot be contained by
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Stoicism claims that there are two domains of life: the external—the things outside of our mind, which we cannot control—and the internal—our mental reactions and interpretations of the external, which we can control. When we persist with the belief that things outside of ourselves or things in the future will provide us with a form of ultimate happiness, we exchange the real moments of our lives for ones that do not exist.
“Almost nothing material is needed for a happy life for he who has understood existence.”
We must realize that nothing is good or bad inherently; only our judgments and interpretations of things can be good or bad.
“The wise man,” Seneca wrote, “is neither raised up by prosperity nor cast down by adversity; for always he has striven to rely predominantly on himself, and to derive all joy from himself.” In other words, we must try to form our perspective to best serve our ability to remain with happiness and wonder regardless of the ups and downs of life.
We don’t have much, if any, control over what happens to us, how people see and treat us, or what happens because of what we do, and in the big picture, none of it really matters all that much anyway.
A key principle of Stoicism is understanding that if the only thing we can completely control in life is our internal domain, and we cannot truly control anything external, then one should try to maintain an awareness that the things we are concerned about could and very likely might happen, that life will contain moments of tragedy and sharp turns, and that we should be prepared for these moments both mentally and practically in any way we can.
As a consequence, perhaps our goal should be reducing unnecessary worry, rather than removing it entirely. Perhaps by accepting that one will always feel unease and that this is a natural part of the tragic backstory of human life, paradoxically, one might worry a little less about worrying as a whole.
It’s not that we have a short time to live but that we waste most of it. Lucius Annaeus Seneca
It is inevitable that life will be not just very short but very miserable for those who acquire by great toil what they must keep by greater toil. They achieve what they want laboriously; they possess what they have achieved anxiously; and meanwhile they take no account of time that will never more return.
The balancing act of now and later is nearly an impossible feat, but it is only in the examination of time that we get to consider such a problem. And it is perhaps only in the consideration of such a problem that we can feel the wonder that is the blender of human consciousness—a sense of confusion wrapped in intrigue, curiosity, and the desire to find resolution.
this permits us to no longer be subservient to some specific grand meaning or template of life, that we don’t have to discover or join in on someone else’s ultimate answer or way of living, nor should we live in hopes of some future ideal or afterlife. Rather, we should attempt to follow our own barometers of meaning and believe in the only thing we have any evidence to believe in at all: ourselves and our relationship with this little sliver of time and space.
What one can seem to do, however, is follow, discover, and create a personal meaningfulness that endures the fact that life can never be completely happy, perfect, or certain.
Rather, beyond our experience is, according to Schopenhauer, a singular, unified oneness of reality—a sort of essence or force that drives existence that is beyond time, beyond space, and beyond all objectivation.
Schopenhauer would go on to explore and define this force by referencing and probing into the experience of living within the body, suggesting that this is the only thing in the world that we have access to that is not solely a mental representation of an object but is also a firsthand, subjective experience from within it.
The pursuit of universal objectivity or meaning in the world beyond this one took the spirit out of the present, earthly human experience of meaning, which is inherently subjective, independent, and expressive.
“If we have our own why in life, we shall get along with almost any how,” Nietzsche
Is suffering in the continual pursuit of desire and self-destruction in the name of growth toward an unattainable end goal really a good thing?
If right now you were told that you would relive this life exactly how it has gone and exactly how it will go, with all its ups and downs, fortunes and tragedies, pleasures and pains, over and over for eternity, what would you think? Would you be terrified? Would you want to change it? Would you be happy with it? What could you do or think to make it ok, and perhaps even desirable?
But in this reality, the one we must live, there was no option to have done differently, and there is no other way for things to go. Every decision you’ve made was the best and only decision you could’ve made at the time with the information you had and the state of mind you were in. And every condition of life that either these decisions led to or that are fundamental to life in general, you have no control over and cannot change.
I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful.
it is more or less death specifically that both causes the futility of life as well as poses the inevitable limit to all reason within it.
When all the current reasons—moral, esthetic, religious, social, and so on—no longer guide one’s life, how can one sustain life without succumbing to nothingness? Only by a connection with the absurd, by love of absolute uselessness, loving something which does not have substance but which simulates an illusion of life. I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing.
Cursed with the gift of consciousness, we are all inescapably forced into a beautiful confrontation of the void and the absurd inevitability of creating meaning and somethingness out of it.
Mom
Kafka’s take on the human condition, which could be characterized as the unyielding desire for answers about and conquest of the existential problems of anxiety, guilt, absurdity, and suffering, paired with an inability to ever really understand or control the source of these problems and effectively overcome them.
follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
We each have our little flickers of time here. No one else will ever know much, if anything, of what it’s like to be who we are. And for the most part, no one will ever really care. Our life is ultimately our life, and so long as we are not harming others in the process, we must create a life of our own meaning, determining our own objects of importance, committing to their pursuit, and reaping the significance and wonder of life along the way.
no path that we take will ever ultimately resolve the uncertainty of life.
To face up to the abyss, to feel the anguish of choice and potentiality, to bear the weight of self—all are but visceral, humbling, and beautiful reminders of the potency of life running through our veins.
In the acceptance of our absurd human experience, we realize that the point is not to eliminate absurdity or find and defend some ultimate truth, but rather, it is to be conscious and appreciative of the things within the absurdity—to look for, find, and create things that are interesting and personally meaningful.
It is thus the absurdity of life that makes it worth living in the first place.
