Scour the philosophy books all you want, gather as much “information” as is possible as to the state of the human condition, and what do you get for it? Jack shit. Life’s most pressing questions are impossible to answer, and that is so damn depressing. We’re all trapped, trapped in our slowly decaying bodies. We’re all doomed.
Our lives are tragicomedies, perversely short and laughingly pointless productions orchestrated by a dumb and mute God who doesn’t lift a single cosmic FINGER to fucking help us out every once in a while, revealing to us a little direction, a single fucking affirmation…that’s all I ask. From the Greek philosophers of old to the existentialists of today, a wide array of theories and explanations have been proposed, but to no avail, and to no affect. The history of human consciousness is a history of emotional blight and futile questing for a Truth, any Truth. And yet the Truth eludes us, and will continue to do so until our merciful demise, because, by a cruel default permitted and overseen by a cruel God, the answers we so desperately seek are the ones we’re inherantly forbidden to realize.
And yet there’s hope.
Sigh.
I hope Jesus or Buddha or perhaps that god the Mayas worshipped, you know, the one with the long name that starts with “Q,” reads this message board.
Well, on a scale of 1-10 in the Depressing rant meter. I give this one a 10.
Sheesh lighten up. Everything happens for a reason, and belive it or not, we usually are not supposed to know why.
Says who? That’s not good enough. Before I die (which, according to http://www.thespark.com 's highly scientific “Death Test,” should happen in a good 30 years or so), I want to know why I was living. I’ve no guarantee that I’ll be given the post-mortum Q&A session with The Big Guy that so many Christians are eagerly awaiting, so I’m curious now, and sometimes, as disturbed as this sounds, it’s hard to perform the tedious, ultimately pointless activities required to get through each tedious, ultimately pointless day without any guarantee of purpose.
I know you won’t like this much because it really won’t help you with your head in that particular frame of mind but…
You are here to help everyone else.
I know, I know, that seems so trite and fuck you hard, bitch, but allow me to elucidate: We all get our time here on Earth to help everyone else.
I’ll bet a lot of folks saw your post and were going, “Yeah, yeah, what’s the fucking point?!” The point is there is no point but for all of us to get along and stop killing and hating each other.
Sounds easy, right? It isn’t. It’s hard. It’s really hard to love your father that hurt you or your neighbor that drives you batty with his stereo… it’s hard to love people and help people you can’t stand to be around. But, this is life. It’s living and getting along and making things better for those who come next.
It’s like the camps up along the Himalayas (sp?). You get to a camp and find wood and supplies and your job is to replenish those supplies for the next group on pilgrimage after you. Someone else has done the work for you the first time and you reciprocate by providing for the next group.
This is life. Do unto others. Even if you’d rather bash their stupid fucking heads in with the nearest rock!
I just can’t wait to see the bashing I’m going to get for this but this is honestly what I feel. There is no point, really. We just have to help each other survive. Why not make it easier for each other? Because, I also honestly think, you come back again and again until you get it right. But that’s just me…
I’ve been here before, I think. I don’t think I really have it down this time but I have to say, I really, REALLY enjoy the ride! I LOVE being alive and doing what I’m doing. I’m sorry that you are so angry and hating it but I don’t agree with you. I love being here. I love my life and look very eagerly forward to the next 70 years.
“…that seems so trite and fuck you hard, bitch…”
–Byz
Come again? Were you calling me a bitch?
First off, I’m not 100 percent serious. I’m 75 percent serious, which is still pretty fucking serious.
Ok. We’re here to help others. We’re here to, metaphorically, gather wood for the next generation of pilgrims. But why? The fact that the “pilgrims” are coming to the mountaintop seems to indicate that there exists some REASON for their painful ascention, as does the fact that their predecessors have made such a to-do about getting the fire going. I guess that, if we can’t find a point to it all, we’ll just have to eventually come to accept that the ascention itself, as meaningless as it might seem, is the answer.
You’re looking in the wrong place, you ninny! Go out and rent “Monty Python and the Meaning of Life”. After that, you’ll NEVER doubt your existence again. I guarantee it*.
*Use of the word “guarantee” in no way implies any sort of guarantee.
Sometimes I really like being an agnostic… I don’t have to blame god, jehovah, allah, or any other deities for the shit that happens in my life. It might be nice to have someone to blame once in a while but until I find proof positive I guess I am responsible.
My purpose here? I have no freaking clue but I sure am enjoying the trip and my continuing search for enlightenment. Along the way I find that helping others is very satisfying and fulfilling.
I meant that as if someone reading my words were talking to me. I was calling myself a bitch… if I were going to call YOU names I’d use some obscure Latin. Haven’t you read ANY of my posts?
And you did get the point. The ascension, itself, is the point. We ascend. We move up. I guess, we get “high” from helping others. Making life easier for other’s makes our life easier. Even though, most times, it doesn’t seem that way.
I guess you can look like it like this:
I can make life really miserable for all those around me. I could be a total bitch and fuck them over and just generally make their life hell. Sure, yeah, we all still live but no one is having a good time.
Or, like I said, I can be nice and try to make everyone’s life a little better by being nice and maybe getting the mail for my elderly neighbor or reading a story to a child in my life or by giving my mom a few bucks or letting someone cut in during a really bad traffic jam.
Get it?
I’m not doing so much. Really. I’m not going out of my way a whole lot but the little I do makes their life better. And what do I get out of it? I feel pretty damn good about me. I feel like I’m doing something, anything, to help. No, I’m not putting anyone through college or giving them the high life but I make things just a bit nicer.
Random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty.
Why make things harder for those around us? Sure, yeah, I can be a real bitch on the board and I will continue to be so… but I never attacked out of no where. I usually have a damn good reason for giving someone hell. Usually, I’m trying to get THEM to be more temperate. But overall? I think I’m pretty nice.
But, I’m probably alone in that. I should probably get out of the Pit more often!
I don’t remember the quote exactly, but Henry Miller once said something like: If everyone knew the truth they would stop getting out of bed in the morning and doing the normal things they do everyday.
Religon, a god that saves, heaven, a soul, is all just wishful thinking because the reality is so hard to face.
We are just animals, organisms, humans, whatever you want to call yourself and it’s a good possibility it is all pointless. I find it incredibly freaky to think that humans have been on earth for 2 million years. Just be glad you were born after they invented electricity. Soooo i guess just try and have fun and learn, that’s about all i figured out so far.
So be it. Having consulted The Script, your cosmic role seems to be as follows:
Age 4: While standing in line at a grocery store with your mother, you made an adorably cute comment about bears. The woman standing behind you in line was so charmed by your childlike innocence that she changed her mind about whether she should have children. The child she gave birth to a year later grew up to become the kid that founded Napster, and has thus brought joy to millions of greedy college kids and agony to Metallica, neither of which is considered a Bad Thing.
Age 8: You did a lot of rambunctious playing outside this summer. Your elevated activity level caused you to exhale more carbon dioxide than usual, allowing local plants to grow slightly more lushly. This, in turn, enhanced the scenic nature of your hometown. Your selfless contribution to the local flora appears to be indirectly responsible for a 0.00003% increase in the number of tourists attracted to your area over a four-year period.
Age 14: You consumed a ballpark hot dog that had been improperly stored and contained abnormally high bacterial levels. Your immune system was able to deal with the problem with a minimum of discomfort, but the customer behind you, an elderly grandfather, would surely have been felled by the tainted meat. Because of you, he lived on to produce another two years of a sappy, family-oriented comic strip that incrementally enhanced the lives of overly-sentimental newspaper readers in 14 cities.
Age 18: While smoking pot with some friends during your freshman year of college, you launched into a long ramble about how you can hear that a t.v. is on even when the volume is turned down. Your extended monologue on this subject was sufficient to distract your dope-addled colleague, listening to “Deal” by the Grateful Dead, from fully entertaining an idea for a sitcom about identical twin cocktail waitresses at a casino in Las Vegas. Thanks to your rambling, the project never materialized, and our collective national dignity was preserved ever-so-slightly.
Age 19: Your patronage of a local pizza establishment during the year allowed the owner, a recent Pakistani immigrant, to send a few extra dollars per month more to his brother in Islamabad. The following year, the brother was able to emmigrate to America using, in part, your dollars, and became a cab driver in New York City. He later caught the attention of a producer for the David Letterman show, and was briefly featured in a series of bits for that show.
Ok, so God didn’t put you on this earth to cure cancer, but we can’t all be superstars. (However, just between you and me, once you make that impulse purchase of Fritos at a gas station in New Jersey at age 36, your contributions to humanity pretty much taper off to zero. Feel free to just hang around watching t.v. after that.)
I am curious as to what would qualify as “a Truth, any Truth”. There are lots of little truths that you learn every day, but they don’t seem to be enough. I am a Christian, so I have my own theories and beliefs about all of this, but in the end they make no difference to anyone else. The thing is (God this sounds so trite) that the truths you’re looking for will not be found in any sort of textbook or Bible or anything else. They’re only found in living your life.
They say that not all of us will have the Saul on the road to Damascus experience. I think that’s a lie, myself. And I don’t mean that we’ll experience it in a Christian context (though that’s how it was for me). I mean it in that blinding realization of what the point of it all really is. It’s not one of those things you can find, either, it has to find you. Sorta like happiness: the harder you run after it, the more elusive it becomes.
So put the books away and pay attention to the important things. You’ll figure it out soon enough.
Just as a guess, I’d bet that you aren’t having any problems with the mountain (the real one, not the metaphorical one), or the trees or the stars in the sky. On rare occasions, you may have some personal irritation with the crabgrass, the rain, the kitty cat in heat outside your window, or the rock against which you stubbed your toe, or even the flu, but you can probably cope with these things.
It’s people, right? Life’s “most pressing problems” and the “existence” that you hate is the social life and social existence: personal relationships, the world of jobs and employment, the universe of home, apartment, neighborhood, street, and city, and of politics and taxes and laws and restrictions and coercions and tensions and wars, medical insurance deductibles and 401k monthly statements and ISP down times and the price of gasoline and all that, right?
Not to mention boredom loneliness and emptiness in our technologically advanced world of plenty?
OK, yes, it sucks. I don’t really regard it as fit for human habitation either. On the other hand, unlike, say, background cosmic radiation, this thing called “society” with all of its structures and systems does not have an independent existence; it exists only in our minds, collectively speaking. The hypothetical POSSIBILITY for a less painful, less annoying, and more FUN world exists and always has existed, and therein lies the purpose of life:
Fix the world into which you were born. If I were God I would not offer you heaven or hell, but I would continually reincarnate you, perpetually reinstalling you into a world you helped create.
That said…and as trite as this may (does) sound…if one can learn to concentrate on the good things (the fact that, for instance, we still have AIR) and try to ignore the bad things (like the mildew in my bathroom that smells like cat piss even though we don’t have an indoor cat), life tends to go more smoothly.
If life had an inherent reason, there would be a possibility that we wouldn’t like it. But nothing has any inherent reason for existence that we don’t decide on. Everything could be different and nobody would notice except that we’re here to notice things and give things value.
You’re here to fulfill your purpose in live. What’s that purpose? How the hell do I know? You’ll figure it out.
There is no truth about this. There are no facts about this that can be checked on a blackboard or under a microscope.
It is given to us humans, as sentient creatures, to give things value. And we can do so, and decide what has value and what doesn’t. Or we can live empty, unfulfilled lives.
And now that you have the secret of life, what are you going to do with it? You’re here because your parents played pattycake one night. When you die you’ll be compost. What you experience in between is mostly up to you. That’s all. So what?
Nurlman: