Psuedothought

Tag: philosophy

  • Is Happiness a Meaningless Pursuit? Pt 4.

    What does it mean to live meaningfully? Should you pursue happiness or meaning?

    What does it mean to live meaningfully?

    Take note of your achievements. It can be anything. A successfully deep relationship, a benchmark in the gym or other areas of fitness, learning an instrument, winning a competition, writing a story or a book, or doing anything that you might categorize as worthwhile for that matter. What do all of these things have in common? Toil. perhaps the greatest philosophical misconception is that a life of toil is a life of misery, but this could not be further from the truth. I am not one to stamp the label of objectivity onto virtually anything but, on this matter, I am confident in my stamp of objectivity. There is nothing that you, or anyone else, has ever done that was worth doing that did not require toil, sacrifice, suffering or moments of deep unhappiness. This truth is one that does not need to be reiterated. Everyone knows this!! Even when you read this, you might go “Duh, this is pseudo-profound bullshit”, and maybe it is pseudo-profound bullshit, but this is my blog, so suck it up! I think people conflate pointless toil with toil. Yes, a life of pointless toil is meaningless. 9-5 every day so that “the man” can extort more people for money is miserable and this gives toil a bad rep.

    The key to living a meaningful life is to carefully select your toil so that your efforts are not in vain. So, here is the rule: Choose the highest good you can think of and toil in pursuit of it until it kills you. Engage in a battle for something worth fighting for. Literally, or figuratively, it really doesn’t matter, but that is what maximizing the meaning in life looks like. Those are the things that are worth doing. The things you know to be good, the things you know you should be doing, but aren’t because the toil is a terribly heavy burden.

    Should you pursue happiness or meaning?

    The very question is nonsensical. If you deconstruct what most people mean when they say, “My goal in life is to be happy”, you’ll find that they either don’t really know what they mean when they say “happy”, or they’re description of happiness is actually meaning. If by happiness you mean relaxing on the beach with a drink in your hand, then you’re terribly misguided and are unable to identify what genuinely fulfills you. If by happiness, you mean fulfillment, then when you run from struggle, you are running from the happiness that you seek. “What you want most will be found where you least want to look” (a person, probably).

    What of the stoic sage? What of the man who understands these truths and rightfully points out that you can engage with life meaningfully while also mitigating negative emotion maximally. It’s true, Rosa parks, MLK, Martin Luther (German Version), Ralph Nader, the founding fathers, could have just as well have been stoics while engaging in a battle for what they believed to be the highest good. Though, I doubt that to be the case, it does take a remarkable amount of disregard for others’ opinions, failure, and their own negative emotion to fight as they did. All stoic qualities.

    This is where I will lose most stoics, and perhaps most people. It is good to train yourself away from senseless anger and whining. It is good to have gratitude. In fact, it is meaningful. It is difficult to do these things and will require sacrifice and toil to do them. However, I posit that there IS a limit to the nobility of this pursuit. The depth of your condition is equivalent to the depth of your experience. I will not shun grief. It serves me well to welcome suffering. To feel what others feel. To cry when it isn’t necessary, to take on the burden of existence in its fullest capacity. It increases the depth and breadth of my experience and thus the robustness of my condition. I welcome all there is to feel, not because I enjoy the terrible, but because I know it to be a part of existence. Really, it’s an accumulation of what there is to be felt. I want to be a collector of pieces that come together to paint the condition of sentience. The stoic sage wholly forsakes negative emotion as if it is a defect in our programming but that is half of the truth. Forsake senseless rage, anxiety and bitterness, yes. But negative emotion is vital to the comprehension of existence. It is for this reason that the stoic sage is misguided. Why the stoic sage, delighted and joyful, cannot understand the depth of meaning in what it is to exist. Stoicism should be a superficial pursuit alone. To rid you of your childish emotions and encourage maturity in times of turmoil. Any deeper eradication of emotion is a mistake. It is a loss of knowledge. It prohibits you from painting and understanding the full picture of existence.

  • Is Happiness a Meaningless Pursuit? Pt. 3

    What is the value of Stoicism? Is life more meaningful when you’re happy?

    What is the value of stoicism?

    I should preface this by saying that there is value in Stoicism. Not the hottest take, but it’s worth saying, given the context of this post. Negative visualization, the trichotomy of control, psychological fatalism, the internalization of goals are all of great utility to the individual. What I’m attempting to ascertain is where the utility ends. It is useful to not get angry at others stupidity, say, in traffic. It’s useful to recognize the finitude of all things so as to increase your gratitude for them. It is useful to understand that things are what they are, and to greatly concern yourself with something that is, is wasted effort and tranquility. It is useful to alter your goals so that you are striving only for what you know you can control.

    The aim of the stoic sage is to achieve maximum inner tranquility. Much like a Buddhist monk, the stoic sage will be someone unaffected by the outside world. Content in all they have, infinitely grateful and minimally emotionally influenced by tragedy. If such a person could exist, they would be joyful and delighted irrespective of their circumstances. That is the aim of stoicism.

    Is life more meaningful when you are happy?

    Think of a time where you’ve been purely happy. Chances are, you’ve never experienced pure bliss and pure delight. How could you? Experiences are much more nuanced than that. Even at your own wedding, there will be sweetness and bitterness, happiness and sadness, and probably everything in between. So, you might be asking, what then is “pure happiness”? It is a perversion of the experience of man, an augmentation of the neurochemistry of your brain. It is drugs.

    I have regretfully done many drugs, and most experiences can be rather nuanced in the emotions you feel. However, some are what I would describe as “pure happiness”. MDMA is one of these drugs. I must be clear. I do not refer to happiness in the sense that a man with a wife and kids refers to happiness. What he is referring to is meaning. He is not happy all of the time and so when he says that they make him the happiest he’s ever been, he is saying that his life is the most meaningful that it has ever been. I am talking about chemical happiness. pure joy, pure delight. The lack of negative emotion. This state, to the stoic sage, is the optimal state, though they would certainly advise against achieving it through chemical means.

    I bring up drugs because it reveals a truth. I often find that, to know the truth/value of a statement, philosophy or assertion, one imagines it in its most extreme from. For example, if I assert that sacrificing for others is invariably noble, you might investigate that by imagining I give my life so that a murderer might be spared. That certainly calls the veracity of my claim into question. If a stoic says that pursuing happiness and the avoidance of negative emotion is the key to living a good life, I’m compelled to think back on a time where I have been a stoic sage. Unbothered by my circumstances, blissful and delighted. Obviously, being strung out on MDMA is different than training your mind to be happy irrespective of its circumstance, but I digress. I bring it up because the truth that it reveals is that happiness IS categorically different than meaning. It is for this reason that I might suggest that life isn’t more meaningful when you are happy, rather you are happier when life is meaningful, but what does it mean to live life meaningfully?

  • Is Happiness a Meaningless Pursuit?

    Pt. 1

    Sisyphus Finally Unlocks Gold Boulder ...

    I have recently finished the book A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy. In the book, the author equips the reader with a number of tools that they can employ to achieve “tranquility”. He shows the reader how they can use negative visualization, the trichotomy of control, the internalization of goals, psychological fatalism and other tactics to achieve emotional and psychological tranquility. I was eager to put these tactics to the test.

    I engaged in negative visualization, the internalization of my goals and psychological fatalism to great success. I found myself to be happier, more content, and more grateful for my privileges. “Great!!!” I thought. I had done it. I now have the key to minimizing my suffering. “Now what?” I asked myself. It wasn’t very stoic of me; But really, now what?!

    I know I know, to want is to suffer, to lust is to denigrate, to control is to disappoint, yada yada. But now what? Really, It’s a good question!! Is tranquility really the end goal? Does the stoic sage know the meaning of life and if they do, is it really to mitigate one’s own suffering? To want for nothing? To neglect what one cannot control? To let the world be? Is the goal of life to be happy?

    Matthieu Ricard might answer yes.  Born in France in 1946, he initially pursued a career in molecular genetics, earning a PhD from the Pasteur Institute in 1972. However, he abandoned this path to dedicate his life to Tibetan Buddhism. He was later subjected to a brain scan that suggested inordinately high levels of happiness and low levels of negative emotion. He was dubbed “happiest man in the world”. An interesting story, but all I see is a man who spent decades forsaking the external world so that he can find peace.

    On paper, it seemed to me that these pursuits are rationally sound. You don’t have the genetics you want? It’s okay, you can’t control that. You don’t have as much money as you want? It’s okay, money is an empty pursuit. You and your wife aren’t having sex? It’s okay, sex is just the friction between sexual organs. There are wars and famine that you could have a hand in opposing? It’s okay, you can’t control others. Your mom dies? You shouldn’t mourn outside what you can’t control because she wouldn’t want you to be sad and it helps nobody. You want more in life? To want is to suffer. Every practice outside of negative visualization just felt wrong. I pride myself on intellectual honesty, I champion rationale, and these are nothing if not rational statements; but my feelings told me a different story. A more human story.

    As much as I might try to convince myself that I am rational, I am, first and foremost, human; and I am defined by my condition. I realized that it felt wrong, not because these tenants are irrational, but because they are antithetical to my humanity. Do I really want to limit my suffering? That which breaths life into me? Should I suffocate my struggles and wants until I am wantless, delighted, forever happy? No. My Sisyphean struggle is my value. Sisyphus does not retire. He does not settle for the bottom of the mountain. What a story it would be if he said “well, I can’t control the boulder, my efforts are moot and I shall rest at the bottom of the mountain for all eternity”. BOOORING…Useless. Meaningless.

    Here are the questions at hand: Should you engage in a battle for what you believe to be your highest good, or strive to achieve perfect internal tranquility? Are they dichotomous? Is there value in Stoic practices? If so, where do we draw the line between useful stoicism and limiting stoicism? Is the pursuit of happiness meaningful? What is our condition?

  • You’re the Boring One and Here’s Why

    Have you noticed that pseudo-intellectuals tend to cognitively posture by accusing “normal” people of being boring? I used to be like this. “normal people are so boring. Imagine talking about the weather! Small talk is small minded” I would say. If you think this way, I do not regret to inform you that you are pretentious, and it’s YOU who’s boring. If you can’t be interested in the infinite depth of someone, their beliefs and their beliefs about their beliefs, then you are the small-minded person. Or, more likely, you are self-involved. Dying to discuss your own opinions and beliefs, uninterested in inquiring about someone else and their equal, if not greater, experiences.

    Dissenters might rebuttal my assertion by saying that they are “genuinely more interesting! They can talk about philosophy and religion and science and theory. What can normal people talk about?” If you are the dissenter I speak of, it might serve you to note that you can’t actually talk about these things either. You speak superficially. You ask someone what they think about panpsychism so that you might be able to express your own thoughts in an attempt to sound intelligent and interesting. Anyone can discuss these topics if you are genuinely interested in discussing them. Do you want to know the questions you’d ask if you were genuinely interested in someone’s framework of philosophy? You’d ask why. Why did you choose to do this? How do you feel about your choice? Do you regret your choice? Why didn’t you choose to do something else? Most people don’t spend their time in their head. They don’t ponder philosophies, theories, or religion in great depth. Not because they’re dumb, but because they’ve already made up their mind on the topic; And the abstract implications of their beliefs and philosophies inherently manifest in what they choose to do, why they choose to do it, how they feel about what they chose to do and how they feel about those feelings. All of which are far more interesting, complex and worth discussing than whatever pseudo-intellectual garbage you want to regurgitate from a book that you read recently. If you were really interested in “intellectual pursuit”, your pursuit would not be a pursuit of self-indulgence, as it so often is. It would be a pursuit of curiosity, admiration and discovery. If your conversation is about the weather, that’s your fault. You’re boring, self-involved, and you can’t be bothered to be genuinely curious.

  • Insidious Colonization

    The political and social discourse surrounding colonialism tends to be characterized by overt violence, genocide, oppression and explicit undermining of the native peoples. In Things Fall Apart, however, Chinua Achebe offers an alternative narrative. One that depicts colonialism as a masquerade. A quiet imposition that introduces a subtle and insidious asphyxiation of the native culture through pseudo-heroism, racism, and a fundamental misunderstanding of culture, religion and science. Additionally, despite common perception and subverting the narrative of overt violence like we see in slavery in the Caribbean and native American conflict, there is solid ground on which to say that this silent imposition that steals the colonized voice, shrouds the colonized life, and disregards colonized desires is the primary medium through which colonialism has been perpetuated. As opposed to colonialism as a physical institution, this schema of colonialism is reliant on the deprivation of colonized voices and is the chief characteristic in what makes it so difficult to determine when or if colonialism ends.

    Historical and epistemological theft is the primary actor in modern day colonialism as the voice of the colonized, the only source of power in an oppressed population, is stolen and kept away, not just by rewriting history, but by altering the cultural and ideological frameworks through which they are even allowed to have a ‘voice’ in the first place. In Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak?, she touches on this topic when she writes ““For the ‘true’ subaltern group, whose identity is its difference, there is no unrepresentable subaltern subject that can know and speak itself; the intellectual’s solution is not to abstain from representation.” “The object of the group’s investigation, in the case not even of the people as such but of the floating buffer zone of the regional elite-subaltern is a deviation from an ideal – the people or subaltern – which is itself defined as a difference from the elite.” The colonized cannot meaningfully represent themselves, as their identity is characterized by the power structures that oppress them; and while academics might try to represent the subaltern, their representation cannot be accurately articulated because it is mediated by these structures. Though her assertion that the subaltern cannot speak is an appeal to the female experience during British colonization and the illegalization of the practice of Sati, it holds true in any imperialist hierarchical structure that colonizes, not only the land, but the ideological structure of the society it’s imperializing. These westernized structures inhibit the present, past and future voices through historical manipulation and dogmatic institutionalization. The theft of the colonized voice is chronic and whole. Once a nation has undergone the metamorphosis of western ideological invasion, the past voices of the colonized have already been stolen, the present voices have been undermined through the hierarchical structure of western doctrines through which they are mandated to communicate, and future voices will be tainted by historical manipulation of western authorship.

    The physical institution of colonialism is a trivial matter in the actuality of its realistic and intangible consequences. Colonialism cannot end, not because imperialists persist in the present day. In the discussion of the existence of colonialism, that fact, true or not, is irrelevant. Colonialism cannot end because its oppression is impossible to undermine. The voice is the only weapon the colonized have against oppression and it is stolen, raped, silenced and bastardized through ideological designs, intentional or not. Thus, allowing the colonizer to engage in a pernicious cultural theft that is invincible to meaningful attack or criticism. This is colonialism and it is a greater tragedy than the death of people: The death of what it means to be those people; and the inability to know.

  • Late-stage Capitalism is Corroding Art

    I am not a dissenter of capitalism, nor an advocate for Marxism or socialism, or any other system of government for that matter. I have not the knowledge nor the intelligence to confidently pledge my allegiance to anything more complicated or tangible than personal philosophy. What I can do, however, is observe. My experience has revealed one prevailing, unsurprising, truth about capitalism. Capital is law. It’s why Europeans work to live while United Statesians live to work. It’s why we’re fatter, dumber, more addicted, sicker and have higher crime rates. If there’s a problem in the United States, follow the money and you’ll find someone who’s withholding the information to solve it. Or worse, someone who’s creating it. What are the broader implications of this system? The consumer is exploited. Every product and service is rigorously, and sometimes scientifically, scrutinized to maximize profit and minimize expense, exclusively to your detriment. It was once believed, and still is by some non-observers, that a market controlled by capital would increase the quality of its production in response to competition catalyzed by consumer demand. Perhaps there was once a time where this was the case, but that time has passed.

    If you don’t believe me, I ask only for you to use your brain. Automotive and tech industries are rife with planned obsolescence so that the consumer must keep buying, our food is filled with carcinogens and preservatives to maximize production and shelf-life, Airlines gouge its passengers because how else are you going to get across the ocean? And all of this is exacerbated by the same parent companies and shareholders who own and control large corporations in every corner of the private sector, creating pseudo-monopolies where there is no explicit ruling company, but a ruling group with one motto: Capital is God. Accrue it at all costs.

    Then there’s art. One would think that art would be immune to the corrosive poison that is late-stage capitalism. Indeed, its subjective nature might deceive you into believing that mass production is virtually impossible. How do you decrease the quality of a product in which its only qualifying characteristic for existence is a quality which is so subjective that it can be infinitely stratified, while also maintaining sales? Leave it to greed to find a way. Appeal to the lowest common denominator. At the risk of sounding pretentious, most people have no standards for art. They’ll watch a film like Happy Gilmore 2, a film with a derivative plot, no tonal or internal consistency, poor jokes, poor slapstick comedy and a cast of stars wasted for cheap gags and think “that was fun”. Which is fine. I am not the arbiter of quality, and I am under no illusion that there is such a thing as an objectively good film. My point is that at least half of the population has no need for intent, passion or meaning in art. Or quality for that matter. Most consumers of art consume art superficially. They don’t engage with it in any way that could be described as intelligent or meaningful. Which, again, is fine. It is not written or codified that one must engage meaningfully with films, music or literature. Nor is there any ground on which to stand that says that I am better because I do. However, capital knows this. It is a god whose omniscience is informed by your purchases; and if your purchases tell it that it can create films void of meaning, good writing, intent, passion, consistency, continuity and acting, then what incentivizes it to put effort into its creation? So, capitalism creates art that is without value save for fundamental, tried and true, narratives. It generates the same slop with no innovation or ingenuity, constantly pushing the envelope on how low the quality can be before the majority loses interest. This is mainstream art. Music sounds the same, books read the same, movies look the same. Art has been reduced to an entertainment machine whose job it is to churn out what brings in the most money at the lowest cost; and it has been refined quite effectively. As impervious to as art might seem, slowly but surely, it too will fall to the whims of capital.