Life

Not satisfied with pontificating in a comment to David's spasm of introspective doubt over at complex superior, I'll now compound the error by blathering on about related things here too.

To begin with, I'd like to lay out my credentials, which are precisely: none. Who the hell am I to waffle on about life as a grownup? A jobless, unmotivated, self-indulgent dilettante, currently being kept afloat by my wealthy boyfriend. 36 going on 15. Independence? What's that? I think I remember having it once, but those were simpler times.

Perhaps the world is full of proper adults of exactly the kind both David and I perceive ourselves not to be. Strong, self-reliant, doing their duty, all that. Never fucking up, or when they do taking the consequences as men, not crawling off to Mama like a spoiled child.

Perhaps. Certainly there are other ways to live than the pampered, neurotic existence we -- that is David and myself and in all probability you, if you're reading this -- take as birthright. Other ways of thinking about oneself in relation to the world. Other priorities.

Still, a lot of that seems to me to be set dressing. If humans didn't have such a consistent sense of themselves as children with an overwhelming need for parent figures, they wouldn't be so bloody obsessed with stern All-Fathers and the welcoming bosom of Mother Church. The nature of our mythological extended families varies a great deal, but they all speak to a fundamental neoteny of the spirit.

But that's not what I want to talk about at all. What I want to talk about is my take on what David called the scary.

The scary doesn't go away. It's a fact of life. It's perhaps the ultimate, most inescapable fact of it. You don't have to be aware of it -- in fact we all spend most of our time trying not to be -- but it's always there. The scary is the true nature of reality.

It's a hard world. It's a lot bigger and nastier than you, and it doesn't give a flying fuck about anything. The number of people who care whether you live or die is vanishingly small, and most of those are destined to come to hate you, or forget you, or become an unbearable burden. You will watch everyone you love waste and die in misery and loneliness and pain and bewilderment unless you die yourself first, which eventually you will. Your life may well be as good now as it is ever going to get, and even if it hasn't peaked already it will almost certainly do so long before the end, and the decline will not be pretty. Your body and mind will slow down and seize up; their disintegration will be long and painful, and none of it will mean a damn thing.

It's a hard universe. All the life that we know of is but a tiny smear of organic matter clinging to an insignificant grain of sand in the middle of so much emptiness that even the thought of it might asphyxiate you. This flimsy band between hot rock and hard vacuum consists of nothing except hunger and rapaciousness and the grinding drive to replicate. There is nothing special about life; it is all just patterns of matter. Perhaps it will be snuffed out tomorrow and the universe will continue into eternity without ever chancing upon it again; perhaps it will spread out to consume everything there is. Either way, it won't carry any particular significance.

In summary: your existence is precarious and irrelevant and won't last. You are dancing on the very brink of an abyss the size of creation. That's the scary.

Curiously, I don't find this brutal assessment especially depressing, although I'm not too happy about falling into ruin and watching my loved ones do the same. I think it's a useful perspective to have.

Of course, different people might draw different things from such an analysis. Some might become nihilists or hedonists, greedy bastards or serial killers. But then there are plenty of all of those who delude themselves that they matter, that they're doing God's will or somesuch crap.

This is what I think:

Just because life is objectively meaningless, that doesn't mean we can't give it meaning. Whatever value it has is only what we create in ourselves and in each other. There is no appeal to a higher power. The devil didn't make you do it. Your deeds will be forgotten, and everything you loved will come to nothing, but they mean something until then.

In the face of implacable universal indifference, the only thing that is worth worrying about is maximizing temporal happiness -- not in a selfish, grasping way, but between people, among us. You cannot justify your own actions absolutely, because there is no absolute yardstick. It is only by the marks you leave on those around you that you can achieve anything of worth, however fleeting.

So: bring joy where you can. Alleviate suffering where you can. Enjoy life to the full, because you won't get another chance. Don't waste what little time you have on regrets.

And if you really, really fuck up, take consolation in the fact that you'll be dead so much longer than you were ever alive that to all intents and purposes the alive thing never happened at all. The universe doesn't forgive, but it readily forgets.
Posted by matt at March 26, 2004 06:32 PM