The Art of Living a Meaningless Existence: Ideas from Philosophy That Change the Way You Think

by Robert Pantano

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.

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 happening around us.

Starting from birth, we seemingly run, if not sprint, through life, racing out of every moment, unsatisfied with what life is and constantly looking to the future for what life could be if we could just obtain something more or different. Our cultures overwhelm us with the reinforcement of this idea, convincing us that our duty is to achieve, buy, own, and live perfect, unaffected lives. This delusion, however, frenzies us with an anxiety that we are then told, by culture, that we can rid ourselves of if we just achieve a few more things, make a little more money, be a little more popular, and buy a little more stuff, creating an endless feedback loop of unsatisfied hunger. If we cave into this, we surrender our life, we give up our self. In the words of Seneca, “We should not, like sheep, follow the herd of creatures in front of us, making our way where others go, not where we ought to go.”

What makes the sad song that I listen to when I’m in my worst of moods work is that it validates my feelings and transmutes them rather than denies them. I have found that this process of admitting and validating rather than denying is fundamental to the process of philosophy, meaning, and truth.

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.

Human life must be some kind of mistake. The truth of this will be sufficiently obvious if we only remember that man is a compound of needs and necessities hard to satisfy; and that even when they are satisfied, all he obtains is a state of painlessness, where nothing remains to him but abandonment to boredom.

“The safest way of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy,”

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.

Kafka’s work embodies and reminds us, not that we wish to give up, but that despite all the problems, we wish to continue. We wish to struggle against the universe and forge our own way. We wish to honestly confront and connect over the absurd, however hard it may be.

The easier, knee-jerk response to the anxiety of choice is simply just not choosing: to mindlessly assimilate popular, common templates and ideas of life, follow standard routes of belief and purpose already laid down for us, and deflect nearly all the responsibility of choice onto others and the circumstances of our life.

And no path that we take will ever ultimately resolve the uncertainty of life.

No matter what we do or say or believe, there will always be a great many people who disagree or judge or ridicule or become upset by our decisions, but so long as we are not intentionally harming anyone else, it is of essential importance that we try as often as possible to ensure that among those people, our self is not one of them.

With this, Camus makes the hopeful yet reasonable assertion that even in the ordinary, repetitive, absurd, and futile experiences of our life, we can and should still find worthy experience and happiness.

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.

There is a world filled with malevolence and anger and greed and impatience and all the rest. But for this very reason—because compassion is so trite and yet still seemingly so hard and absent—it is perhaps all the more essential and rational to give it serious focus and effort.

I can point to a blue pillow and say that the pillow is blue, and since most of us have eyeballs, optic nerves, occipital lobes, and human brains that generally function the same way when it comes to visual processing, we can agree that I am right. However, we can’t actually know that what we see is the same blue, because we cannot see into each others’ minds. Although we both agree we see blue, we cannot know if we are actually having the same mental experience, or qualia, of what we are calling blue. This and all other problems related to the disconnect between our perception and what is really outside of our mind is known as the egocentric predicament.

Naturally and culturally, the desire to be right is a deeply enduring and forceful one. As often as possible, sometimes at all costs and despite good reason, we are both compelled by our psyche and pressured by our social world to always be right. And when we aren’t, it hurts—so much so that it can often create horrible sensations in the brain akin to that of real physical pain. And so, we try to avoid it (or at least avoid admitting it)—and yet, it is impossible to avoid.

With the belief of religious afterlives and solutions increasingly being eclipsed by modern knowledge and understanding, man finds himself unable to do anything ultimately significant or immortalizing as the universe is revealed to be utterly chaotic, indifferent, and meaningless.

To fully enjoy the present moment as often as you can and in as many ways as you can, to fall in love with a person, a thing, a moment, yourself, to make the most of everything despite knowing that you will lose it all to nothing, is more than enough heroism. What’s worse than living a life knowing that one will die is living a life knowing that one will die without having lived as many moments as one can properly relishing in the fact that they have not yet died.

One must be careful to not make the singularness of their shot at existence a pressure to get it all right—to do all the right things and think all the right thoughts and feel all the right feelings.

If we are to be fully human and fully alive and aware, it seems that we must be willing to suffer for our pleasures. Without such willingness, there can be no growth in the intensity of consciousness . . . to strive for pleasure to the exclusion of pain is, in effect, to strive for the loss of consciousness. Alan Watts

There is temptation that looms in every corner, exploited by nearly every company, every cultural ideal, every aspect of oneself, all constantly alluding to the sense that this moment is never enough, and that there is a future where everything is perfect—if we just keep getting a little more of this or doing a little more of that.

In every exhalation, there is a breath to come so long as we keep breathing. In every moment of hardship, pain, confusion, or weakness, there is a story taking place filled with the potential for triumph and vitality worthy of tears bursting with wonder and fondness for life, so long as we keep moving.

In this, Bukowski alludes to the idea that if you have to try to try, if you have try to care about something, or have to try to want something, perhaps you don’t care about it. And perhaps you don’t want it. Perhaps it isn’t your favorite color.

The loss of our early, youthful innocence marks the death of sanity. Not because we were saner as young children, but because there were no expectations for us to be.

The fact that such a world, such a life, expects us to be sane is perhaps one of the most obvious examples of its own madness. We expect the world and the world expects us to be clear, to be lucid, to be rational, but that mad child is still inside all of us, existing with its relative stupidity, but denied the innocence to justify it.