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javajournalism · 3 years

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Existentialism in Six Parts

Or: Why The Fuck Are We Here?

A Philosophical Consideration of Life, Death, and The Weird Shit In Between

PART ZERO: WARNING

What follows might be a lot -- consider this a warning for all things -- hopefully duetted with occasional levity and even a positive conclusion in an attempt to brand myself with unyielding charm and biting wit. Even so, keep in mind that I did say “all things.” After all, aren’t there more things in Heaven and Earth, reader, than are dreamt of in our philosophy?

PART ONE: WHAT IS SCARIER THAN DEATH?

I feel like most people are afraid of death. Who wouldn’t be? We are all afraid that one day we will enjoy life so much that we will have something to lose.

For me, that fear is more of a dull thump in my temple.

The sharp pang in the forefront of my mind, the fear I can’t shake, is that one day I will no longer be afraid of death. One day, there will be so much that overshadows the things I have to lose that I won’t be afraid to lose them anymore.

I mean honestly, how is a creature that is able to predict its own inevitable demise even meant to exist? How can anything live an unfettered existence knowing what’s to come?

Or rather, knowing what’s to come and then not knowing what’s after that?

We can’t. We just can’t, so most of the time we keep ourselves from thinking about it in any meaningful capacity on purpose just so that we can stomach our own beating heart.

Most of the time, we build our walls up so high and so thick, plastering brick after brick so that no axe can chip at it because if we don’t, the dam will break and instead of water we’ll have waves of black ooze, existential sludge induced by our own thoughts.

Or maybe that’s just me.

PART TWO: DOES ANYONE DESERVE ANYTHING?

More than the idea of life and death, I struggle with the idea of “fairness,” by which I mean I struggle with the absence of it.

I don’t know why it’s fair that I get to live a comparably good life. I certainly earned some of the good things in my life, but I didn’t earn being born somewhere peaceful and safe, into a white, middle-class household to parents who love and support me.

I didn’t earn being generally physically healthy. In fact, anything about me that is physically unhealthy is a direct descendent of choices I have made for myself.

(See: Caffeine, nicotine, and not eating for years.)

The fact that I have the time, the resources, and the capabilities to reflect on any existential nonsense means that I practically have it made. So what did I do to deserve it?

And even though I have it, does it save me from suffering?

Nothing changes the fact that even a comparatively good life, a life misted by or drowned in privilege, necessitates the acceptance that the people we love will eventually die.

No matter how wonderful the life given to us, we will one day have to watch ourselves and everyone around us decay; one day our bodies and, maybe more importantly, our minds will scatter into a million pieces and be picked up by a world that doesn’t slow down just because we can no longer keep up with it. And even then, that is only if we’re lucky enough to live long enough to watch it happen. If we aren’t hit by a bus or dropped by an aneurism.

But, (spoiler alert!) no matter how or when it happens, we will one day lose everything.

In the meantime, our only option is to hang out and ask ourselves why.

How is that fair? Why does anyone deserve that?

PART THREE: WHY GIVE A SHIT ABOUT ANYTHING IF IT ALL GOES AWAY?

I did, at one point, consider myself a nihilist. Mostly because I was thirteen, filled with Redbull and Tumblr and puberty-granted angst and I thought it would make the cool, moody kids like me.

But now, in the I-Am-An-Adult-But-I-Still-Feel-Like-I-Know-As-Little-As-I-Did-Then stage of my life, I really think I was overcompensating. I did, at one point, consider myself a nihilist because I also did, and still do, think that most things matter. A lot. I think most things are actually really profound and special, but that’s exactly what scared me.

It’s scary to assert, in the face of a meaningless void where we are but one speck of dust in an infinitely expanding cosmos, that something might mean something to you.

It’s scary to consider the fact that one day you might never get to look at those somethings again. It’s scary to look at the trees, or the sunset, or the stars, or the love of your life, and know that you won’t have them forever even though you love them so deeply.

It’s scary, fucking terrifying in fact, to understand that eventually there will be no more anything: No more climbing into bed with clean sheets, diving into the sea, tasting the first sip of coffee in the morning, feeling wine-induced euphoria, touching or being touched, running fast, biting hard, screaming loud, laughing louder. The fear is debilitating.

How can the joy of having not be overshadowed by the fear of not having?

How can the joy of existing not be overshadowed by the burden of understanding not existing, the burden of having a weird body hanging off of you, the burden of too many emails about too many things that might not actually matter in the end?

How can we possibly keep ourselves from spiralling into a pleasure-seeking, never-finding, Dorian-Grayian husk of hedonism? Realistically, we can’t. That’s scary, too.

But it’s more complicated than that, isn’t it? There’s more left to account for.

PART FOUR: WHAT OF THIS SHITTY WORLD?

What of the melancholy, the boredom, the sadness, the blinding rage, the jealousy?

What of the, and I mean this very seriously, real evil? What of the suffering?

What of the bare hopelessness, the hunger, the sickness, the torture, the war, the entire world on fire? There are entire nations built on graveyards or things worse than graveyards. There are entire nations turning into graveyards or things worse than graveyards.

What of the people who can be monsters, who are monsters right now as we speak, who have been monsters since the dawn of man, and who will be monsters until we are all dust?

What of the universe’s indifference to those monsters?

Worse yet, what of our indifference to them?

What the fuck do we do with that?

I mean, we can write about them, read about them, recite the stories about them low and sober in the candlelight or loud from a podium, but sometimes I feel like if stopping it truly mattered to any of us, we would drop everything and do something. Anything.

But most of us don’t want to do that.

Is it selfish that most of us like our lives -- even when they are scary or confusing or plagued by fears -- and don’t want to give them up?

Is it selfish to not give them up, whether physically giving up our corporeal machinery that keeps us breathing or metaphorically giving up our time and our money that we use to try and create a more meaningful existence for ourselves?

I don’t think admitting that makes us bad people, but it probably doesn’t make us good people, either. I really think it just makes us people.

Sometimes we don’t need extra money, so we give it to someone who does. We vote. We give blood. We go out of our way to compliment people or be nice to the barista at our favorite coffee shop. We write shit like this and hope that it helps someone.

We contribute in the ways we know how, in the ways we can. We try to write new verses for poems, stitch new patches into the felt of the universe hoping to make it a little bit more beautiful, a little bit more complete. But is that ever really enough?

PART FIVE: IS THAT EVER REALLY ENOUGH?

I really think that might be. I try not to be in the business of unnecessarily miserable conclusions. Once you find yourself in the midst of them, they start to color everything with their shade of pale nothingness and they tend to bring about the idea that the more grim something sounds, the more truthful it is. Screw that.

There are terrible things in the world, so many that if you could see them all at once they would break your heart. But, fuck, we’re the only things that we know of who can hope.

Find. Create. Catalyze meaning where there might not be any.

By being overly cynical about the state of the universe, we do a disservice to the infinitesimal chance that there is so much beauty in the world that it will take your breath away.

If we, as people, create meaning and if truth is subjective, we are left with two options that are completely artificial: Either the world is beautiful and wonderful simply because it can be, or the world is a deep, hellish cesspool of suffering simply because it can be. If that’s the case, doesn’t it make more sense to hone in on the man-made truth that is quiet and, in some rare moments, truly joyful?

Maybe, just maybe, you can’t have one without the other. Maybe it isn’t a matter of choosing the “right one,” or pinning down a specific point on a map, or finding the sweet spot in the middle of the spectrum. Maybe it isn’t a spectrum at all. Maybe everything is beautiful and everything sucks, everything is order and chaos, everything is life and death.

Maybe Heaven is a prison. Does that make it any less Heaven or any less prison?

The only thing we know is this: Everything is notable and important because we make it so; because we experience it, we articulate it, and we share it; because we write showy, meandering pieces about it to publish for other students who know just as little as we do about all of the maybes.

We know intimately what it means to live, what it means to suffer, and what it means to die.

But in the midst of that cosmic sleight, isn’t there something so special about arranging the resulting turmoil for our own minds? Isn’t it so beautiful that we are even alive to think about how shitty it is to be alive?

What a gift it is to be fully aware of all this and still choose to, in our own little pockets of time and space, seek out happiness for ourselves and those around us.

PART SIX: CAN THERE REALLY BE A CONCLUSION?

While preparing a, hopefully meaningful, final monologue, I didn’t know quite what to say. There is both so much and so little to focus on. But what I keep coming back to is one idea:

Everything is going to be fine; it will not be perfect and it will be painful, but it will be fine.

“Fine” might be less of an absence of feeling than a resolution of them or it might be the most comforting lie we can tell ourselves, but it might also be the most beautiful truth we can muster. The closest thing to the middle of the spectrum that is not a spectrum.

“Fine” might just be everything and then some.

There will always be death and we will always be aware that it is looming over us like a Jenga tower about to topple. Nothing will ever be fair, but in spite of that,

everything will be fine.

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