Psuedothought

Tag: writing

  • Is Happiness a Meaningless Pursuit? Pt. 2

    What is our condition?

    Night Sky Wallpapers HD | PixelsTalk.Net

     Imagine for a moment that I asked you to look into the night sky and determine who was winning.

    “The darkness” You’ll say.

    why?

    “Because there is more empty space than stars. In fact, the empty space overwhelms matter by infinite orders of magnitude. Even within every atom of every star, there is empty space. More nothing than something.” you’ll say.

    But there used to be no light. No stars. Only darkness. As many orders of magnitude more there is of darkness, there are infinitely more magnitudes of light than there used to be. And that light has to permeate throughout billions of light years of space just to reach our eyes. The whole of space is saturated with light for us. Does that seem like losing to you?

    You are born into a terrible world. Tragedy, betrayal, pain, loss and injustice lurk in every corner of every life. Even the most privileged of us will fail to escape the indomitable pressure of the suffering of life; And if you encounter no suffering until your twilight, which you certainly will, everyone you know and love will die. Just like the sky and her emptiness, darkness consumes all. Surely suffering wins. Surely we are shackled like slaves to the hurt. Surely we are children of the darkness. Born from it, sentenced to live in it, damned to be consumed by it. Forced to watch it eat our brothers and sisters. We are foot soldiers on a nuclear battlefield, under assault on every front, overwhelmed by an impossibly powerful force. There are no prisoners of war here. Only those lucky enough to earn a swift death. It is an unrelenting, indifferent, cruel and taunting darkness. Surely the darkness wins.

    But what’s this? Amidst the chaos and the suffering, someone is knocked down for the hundredth time. Thousandth maybe, they’ve lost count. They’ve lost their jobs. They’re homeless. Their heart’s been broken. They’re ill. They’ve lost their spouse, or their brother, or their mother, or all three. They’ve been raped, assaulted, robbed, buried, addicted. Shrouded in the cold indifferent abyss they lay, tired and wounded. The darkness bears down on them with impossible weight. “Stay down” it says. “I win”.

    And on a battlefield of which victory is unheard of, they resist. They stand. Despite it all, they determine to love, to be virtuous, to defend the weak, to oppose, in every possible vector, the darkness that closes in. To engage in an unwinnable fight of which they will surely not survive, someone else stands. “Stay down” says the darkness. Someone else stands. “Stay down” it says. Then another, and another. Thousands, millions, billions rise to face the void, on a battlefield of which victory is unheard of. Weapons of virtue in hand. Galaxies of effort stand unified against the abyss. Before them, there was only darkness, and so it will be after them. But in this moment, there is unprecedented light; and the more intolerable the fight, the brighter they shine. Every ‘i love you’, every charitable act, every kiss, every hug, every sacrifice, every truth told, every good deed is a swipe of their sword that cuts unbearably deep into the void. Penetrating the darkness with blinding light. And, if only for a moment, there is meaning. Potent and intemperate, impossibly profound meaning saturates and overwhelms. On a battlefield of which victory is unheard of, without respite, they overpower their adversary. 

    The human condition is not characterized by suffering. Rather, It is defined by our rebellion. When the world buries us, when the universe compels us to hate, to sin against ourselves, to forsake love, to forsake effort, to forsake meaning, we rebel. when the darkness says “stay down”, we stand. And when we stand, we bring life. We bring meaning. We bring weapons unheard of. God slayers that subdue the infinite power of our adversaries. The universe is infinite and meaningless, and we are its necessary and mortal opponent; Finite and infinitely meaningful. Just as there is no light without darkness and no good without suffering. Just as the night sky would not have stars without her emptiness, we are the response to nothing. We are the stars that illuminate and define the shrouded and undefined. We find ourselves in a battle of attrition, and we will be outlasted. For now, we stand.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • I’m Better Than YOU

    Is it in poor taste to want to stand out? To want to be better than I am? Better than you are? I sit on a streetcorner in Utrecht, swallowed by the crowd, overcome with sonder. The infinite context of every word spoken and every brick placed, laid bare for me to see. Every cigarette butt and rusty bike. Every drag taken on my joint that the coffeeshop had cut with tobacco, unbeknownst to me. The rain tapped my coat, and I wondered why I felt dizzy. I sat for hours observing that for which I lacked comprehension. The streets were like the canal. Flowing past me with no regard. From where you come, I know not; and to where you’ll go, I know even less. Dear river, your infinity, I want to drink it all! I beg to know your adventures, your loves, your tragedies, your triumphs and losses. But I don’t merely wish to know of them, I want to be intimate with them! Take them to bed and study their hair while they listen to my lungs drag in contaminated air. I want to argue with them and plan a future with them. I want to discuss our kids’ names, and I want them to break my heart. I want to hate them for how much I love them. I want to profess a eulogy at their funeral and watch them fade into the feedback noise of Time until there’s nothing left but an impression of something that used to be. An abstraction of all the life that wasn’t lived. I want to be them. Do you want to be me? Would you then be fulfilled in your pursuit of life? I suppose it is in poor taste to want to be better than you.

    Like, what does that even mean?