Why do we do the things that we do? What’s the point of anything really?
~ The short form, It’s all meaningless
Through my ages of 14 and 15, my mom was fighting cancer and the prolonged fear of potentially losing her caused my brain’s coping mechanisms to kick in. And I have been numb to an array of emotions ever since. That numbness in conjunction with growing up in a household that did not believe in indoctrination, I met my late teens as a radical rationalist.
Life as a radical rationalist revolved around reasoning things, why do something? or why not do something? And an uninterrupted session of such whys always ended up with the most fundamental why, the why of existence? And for years I was deeply troubled for not having an answer. I compartmentalized it as a way to cope, a box in my mind that said, “Do not open”.
Another life pivoting incident in my early 20s forced me to open up Pandora’s box, the why of existence. I think the answer or perhaps the lack of one was obvious, but to comprehend it was the hard part.
Joel was the second Nihilist I met, I had lived with the first one all along.
There’s nothing meaningful to life. Everything that ever was, is and will be, are all just momentary specs on space-time.
This reminded me of the Robert Frost poem, The road not taken.
The realization of life’s meaninglessness is where I am standing in the road of life. I have two roads in front of me, one of death and one of life, but intellectual suicide for company on both.
The rational choice is to just stand in the exact spot, forever. But biological inability (the human flaw) forces you to make a choice.
End of Rationality, the human flaw.
And the difference btw life and death suddenly, is just the briefness of the intellectual suicide. Choosing death for that reason would falsely rationalize the pursuit of minimal suffering! When thought about, it’s an equally irrelevant action.
So, the harder question, what do you do with that knowledge? How do you lead a life or not lead a life after realizing that it’s meaningless?
Free thinking.
Life as an episode in AfterLife
It feels rational to walk both roads rather than to pick. And the road of life allows you to switch to the other road anytime you want.
“Necessary evil”
Now you are on the road of life, living with intellectual suicide. It’s brutal, so biologically, your brain tries to cope, but you’re too smart for that, so you decide to build that coping mechanism yourself, a facade of a system that eases down the explainability of a life alongside intellectual suicide. Not for others, but to tell yourself, everytime the facade falls down. .
When pondering on this, I was reminded of Geometry, an field of mathematics that has it’s foundations based on making up points of reference. The axes in a cartesian plane are meaning less themselves, but the moment you have them, it suddenly looks like every other point has a meaning (it’s still a facade because the meaning is relative to the axes). So to create your a facade, you need axes, meaningless things that would make the rest of your life meaningful.
So what are these axes?
All they are a set of irrationalities, it does not matter what they are, but it matters you have one.
And when you look at life this way, you start seeing everyone as a set of irrationalities.
Every indoctrinated idea is a member of the set. Every principle, every discipline, every rule of life, everyone you love, every passion, etc.
Having known that your life is based on a set, you suddenly wield the power to control your set. Add to it, remove form it. So how should it look now that you can change it?
- Can’t be empty
- Biology adds some defaults
- Have too many - you’re making your life harder, , if a happiness is a part of your set, “Too many fucks to give” is a problem (Subtle art …)
- A great set would be have one other than the uncontrollable defaults
My set of Irrationalities,
- Make shit load of money so that I can help mom when the time comes
- “Fuck you money” so that I can be free
- Pleasure
- Being and living Intellectuality sound
- Travel
- fine things in life