Life is absurd 2

I probably shouldnt have left the previous post hanging for so long as it is. It gives the impression that I have more of a compelling argument for the idea that Life is absurd than I can really lay claim to. In any case, my personal conclusion at the end of this all is not terribly pessimistic anyway, so don't start honing your knives already.

The previous post was more like an introduction and an overview of the entire thread I will be talking about. And the important thing now is to see exactly how absurd life is.

On the surface, it doesnt really seem absurd at all. Look at so many people still leading their lives perfectly fine: no one kneels over from wondering about life, certainly no one have any problem with the notion of living. But perhaps it would be more apparent if we ask more questions about what we do.

For starters: why do we eat? Obviously, the reason is because we hunger. To continue living on for another day, we eat. the same goes for breathing and drinking water, to continue living. Well, the second question now is why do we want to live another day? Presumably some people have a good idea what they are going to do tomorrow, and the day after, maybe even the week after too.

Now we ask again: why do you need to do that which you want to do? I can, for a convenient example, tell you what I want to do by the end of this workyear: I want to graduate from NUS. But whats the point of that? So that I can get a job with a degree? whats the point of getting a job? so that I can earn money to lead a better lifestyle? why do I want to lead a better lifestyle?

That last question is probably where most of us will stop confounded at. Some may go on to say they want to lead a better lifestyle because they feel happier that way. But there really isnt much more space to go beyond that answer. Who, for example, could answer the further question "Why do you want to feel happier?"

Psychologists may be able to do so, drawing on the pleasure centers of the brain as an ultimate explanation why humans generally tend to gravitate towards making themselves happy. But that doesnt sound to me a satisfying answer at all. If we resort to this answer, then all we are saying is that humans are pleasure seeking creatures who don't have any significant purposes in life. All we have are little purposes all ended in trying to satisfy our pleasure centers in our brains.

That brings me to the important bit. So Life is just about satisfying our pleasure centers? All this work to make life happen on this tiny planet called Earth, is just so that the lifeforms would have certain configurations of neurons fire off in certain patterns?

And in case you think there might be a greater purpose that you have been called to Life for, let us think about this scenario which a philosopher proposed. Suppose one day someone came to you and declare that he discovered the True Purpose in life. Suppose that what he said is indeed true and proven beyond any doubts. Suppose he says: "we are all made as food for this higher being. That is our true and ultimate Purpose in life."

Well, that just takes the biscuit doesnt it? Would you yell and scream for joy that you have found the true purpose in life, and feel overjoyed and overwhelmingly satisfied that you have fulfilled your true purpose in life when this higher being reaches out and pop you in its mouth? Would you identify with this Purpose at all? Does it matter a whit what this purpose is (remember it is really what you are given life for)?

So we either have a Purpose which we might not identify with, or we have next to no purpose other than stimulating our neurons to fire off in certain patterns. To a computer observing our antics on the surface of Earth, all this Lively activity is nothing more than a rather complex movement of chemicals and particles, sparking off one reaction after another in a continuous chain. The initial products are some chemicals. The final products are, too, merely some other chemicals. Life is but a colorful name for that complex chemical reaction which goal is to produce a new set of chemicals from the initial reactants.

And who cares about what really goes on in the meantime. Well, we do, some people think. We care about what really goes on in the meantime. But notice that just meant we are interested in overseeing which particular patterns we would like the neurons to fire off in. Why should we care at all, if not simply for the fact that we are physically wired to care without a good reason?

Life is absurd 1

There is a reason why I wrote a post on suicide earlier on. Many reasons actually, but 1 reason is to induce the fear of suicide in people who do read my blog (in case they feel suicidal after reading one of my lamer posts), the other is that I couldnt possibly write it after I wrote this post, for I would have no way of accounting why we should not simply kill ourselves if Life is absurd.

Fundamentally absurd in fact, not merely absurd. On the most superficial level, life is simply absurd if we realise that to live is to die, and happiness is necessary aftermath of sadness. Fundamentally, life is absurd because it is absurd to assign any purpose to life, in the same way as you can't assign purpose to a stone. I will talk about both.

Firstly, we need an idea of why life is absurd at all. The problem with this age, as I see it, is that too many people have their heads buried in their lives, their work, their studies, so entrenched and so engrossed- perhaps subconciously they too realised that life is essentially meaningless.

We are like the ostrich which buries its head in the sand - we refuse to see how meaningless our lives are, so utterly bleak and absurd, and maybe the sheer absurdity of it is why our minds refuse to countenance the very idea, for fear of going mad entirely or simply giving up in despair.

Every life begins with a fanfare: we receive every newborn with much celebration, smiles and hopes for its future. We hope that it would soon open its eyes, it would soon be able to walk, able to talk, able to write and read and go to school. We want it to grow up into the future. But why? Why do we want it to grow up?

Well, perhaps we find that taking care of a baby is a burden, and we want it to be independent of us. Maybe, and a lot of people would disagree thinking that raising a child when its still a baby is much easier than when its adolescent, but assuming thats true, it would seem that we should be pretty content when the baby is around 6 years of age. And we should get happier and happier that it grows older and older. But why? Do we in fact, get happier and happier that the baby grows up? For what reason if we do?

There seems to be no particular reason why we want the baby to grow up. And when the baby, now no longer appropriately called the baby, reached 40years of age, suddenly we turn our attention away, and instead of hoping that he will grow up, we hope instead that he would have a baby that would grow up.

Well, what happen to the man now? Do we stop hoping that he would grow older? Why do we stop doing so, if we ever do? Or do we in fact hope that he would continue to grow older and older?

So many questions, but all just laying the ground for this question: why do we celebrate life at all? What is so great about life? Is it advantageous to us that we live, or any other person for the matter? I cannot finish this post today, but I will leave you peeps with this excerpt written by the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte who described the meaninglessness of life aptly, and in an entirely more direct manner:

I should eat and drink, only in order to hunger and thirst again, and eat and drink, merely until the open grave under my feet swallows me up as a meal for the earth? Should I create more beings like myself, so that they can eat and drink and die, and so they can leave behind beings of their own, so that they can do the same as I have already done? What is the point of this continual, self-contained and ever-returning circle, this repetitive game that always starts again in the same way, in which everything is, in order to fade away, and fades away, only in order to return again as it was - this monster, continually devouring itself in order to reproduce itself, and reproduce itself, in order to devour itself?

u can tell i am bored huh.

Honorary Mosquito Captain: And so we are all gathered here today for your graduation briefing, whereupon Commencement, you are released into the wild, figuratively speaking, to begin your short but ardous career of sucking human blood. Any questions at this point of time?

Mosquito A: I don't remember having taking any courses on sucking blood, where did this graduation ceremony come from??

Mosquito B: I don't remember seeing you either... why are you the Honorary Mosquito Captain?

Capt: Trivial and pointless questions. Really, we mosquitoes should start using our puny brains and not asking silly questions like these, for fear of appearing vacuous.

Any more stupid questions? No? Then I shall start my briefing proper. As you are about to embark on your holy mission to suck human blood, there are a few points to note... Yes? You got a question to ask?

Mosquito C: Ya, why is sucking human blood a holy thing to do? You mean its like we have to perform some rituals prior to sticking our mouths into their skins? That would be sooooo troublesome...

Capt: No, no... Not holy in the sense that you must perform obscene rituals (Mosquito C: I didnt say obscene...), but in the sense that it is a mission given to us by God to save human lives from extinction, and indeed, make them better for it.

Mosquito A,B, and C: Wow....

Capt: The idea is that humans have too much blood. Any experienced mosquito could tell you noobies that if you puncture the skin of any human, their blood will spurt out uncontrollably. That is a sign of high blood pressure, the blood moving from a place of high pressure to low pressure, seeking release from the confines of the taut, high-tensioned skin.

As we all know, high blood pressure is not good for humans, so we are on this mission to help them release some of the pressure in their bodies. You guys have heard of leeches, I presume?

Mosquitoes: Ya. The worm-like bastards right?

Capt: Well, those bastards are our allies: together we form the Universal Blood Service, bound in the mission to relieve humans of their high-pressured blood. The problem is that the leeches are quite rural in nature, and they refuse to leave the forest to service the city-dwellers. So it is up to us mobile units to spread all over the world in aid of the needys.

Mosquitoes: ooooohhh...

Mosquito B: Wait a minute Capt. If our mission is so holy and important as you made it out to be, why do we see humans trying to kill us mosquitoes whenever we try to suck their blood? I mean, I certainly havent been trying yet, but my mother and my cousins and my aunt and grandmother etc., all have died trying. They wouldnt be killing us if we are helping them, would they?

Capt: Of course not. The humans are eternally grateful to us Blood Servicers, and they long to show it. I must say your family has an unfortunate streak of bad luck to be constantly, accidentally, being killed by humans. We must understand that humans, being humans, have human reflexes, and it is natural that they slap their arms and legs whenever they feel the itch. It is most unfortunate when the Blood Servicers are in the way and got squashed unintentionally. But that is okay, since we got so many of us anyway.

Mosquito C: But I heard them cursing and swearing vehemently after we bit them...

Capt: Alright, no more inane questions and smart-aleck remarks.

Back to the pointers I promised you people: as we all know, human blood is sour and quite salty, not tasty at all, as they might have been inclined to think (those egoistic fools). To make our job easier and altogether more palatable, literally speaking, there are certain prime areas we should target, where the blood is fresher, sweeter, and pose less occupational hazard to us blood servicers. Places like the human eyelids, the ear lobes, the elbows and kneecaps, the knuckles on their fingers and toes, are the parallel of fish cheeks: the tastiest part of a fish which anyone should go for...

Mosquito C: Excuse me, what is this "fish cheeks" you are talking about? Have any mosquito actually eaten any of it? I thought we can only siphon liquid?

Capt: Right, forgive my slip. And I was saying, before I was kindly interrupted by a rude cadet, we should always go for places like the eyelids and earlobes, them possessing the freshest supply of blood with minimum amount of cholesterol and cancer causing agents; and the bony areas like elbows and knuckles where the risk of being accidentally slapped is reduced to a minimum.

Second point, we have received reports of sick mosquitoes who went around sucking blood, thus infecting their patients with the disease they carry. The good news is that apparently the disease most commonly carried by these sick mosquitoes, dengue, is not fatal at all, in fact, have hardly any effect on us mosquitoes, and hence presumably, the humans too. The bad news is that the paranoid humans have apparently filed a complaint to our Supreme Commanders, requesting the removal of these infected, but harmless, mosquitoes from the task force. Thus all of you, prior to graduation, would be required to go through a health check, which would be tedious and pointless imo, but over which you have no choice over.

The details of the health check will be briefed to you by that nurse over there, and I've heard it is relatively simple, just requiring you to poke your mouth into a volunteer human and see if he gets infected. Or something like that. Quite easy I should think.

Well, thats all for today. Dismiss.

Suicide

We dont need official figures to know that suicide rates have gone up significantly since the 19th century. In fact, it is probably true that with a high level of education, a country is likely to have a high rate of suicide. I didnt devise that hypothesis, but it might be explicable in terms of human psyche.

What I think, though, is not so much that education indirectly, or directly, induce more people to consider suicide as a viable option, but the crucial factor lies in another vaguely related, altogther more widespread medium: the media.

In a way that resembles advertising, the media constantly portrays people committing suicide - to reflect the society the producers see maybe, to create dramatic endings maybe, for many reasons, some forgivable. What this amounts to is to create a acute awareness of a seemingly viable option on how to "lead one's life" if in a rather warped sense, when things get worse.

Of course, I am not accusing the media of first instilling the idea of suicide in people: most people would probably get the idea of suicide after the first death they witness, and there are countless of it, of animals dying, of relatives passing away etc. The media may have influenced a few kids to contemplate suicide, but that is probably only a fraction of the sea of people who actually were considering suicide.

The fault of media, as I see it, is the fact that media only portray the before and after decision to suicide, neglecting the middle segment, thus giving its audience the false impression that suicide is an easy and painless course of action to take.

It is natural, on the part of the producers, to cut down on the scenes leading up to any decision making on suicide: deciding on suicide is afterall, a boring thing on the surface to any observer. Moreover, they couldnt really capture the falling of bodies from great heights accurately, and the great anxiety suiciders feel at the moment of jumping/slitting their wrists, the tremendous fear while falling, the near overwhelming fear while in mid air of slamming into the hard ground, and the great pain that does issue from doing so at the end.

For viewers, and hence potential suiciders, the decisions to suicide only amounts to a few scenes: decide on committing suicide, standing on th edge of a building followed by a jump, and a scene cut, whereby the person is shown sprawling on the ground 30 stories down (in reality, most suiciders dont die that prettily either).

We add into the mix, the novelty of bungee jumping, thus giving people the illusion that the fear one experienced while in mid air isnt really that great, for thrill seekers do that all the time, and with relatively low casualties. Then, subconsciously they might think, the actual thing to fear during the whole process is merely the instant of slamming into ground, which isnt that great, for it is afterall, an instant only. Suicide becomes a quick and clean process of solving one's problems in life.

But what do we know about dying, really? Do we really die that fast? With great pain that the brain cant comprehend and thus shuts down the entire functioning of the body in an instant? What if we really couldnt die that fast? Maybe at the end of a fall, our limbs flew apart, our mouths refuse to work properly, but for a second or a minute, our brains continue to experience the immense agony of -censored- ?

Less vividly, we know that Time is relative. In a simple manner, time passes slower when you are doing things you dont enjoy, but faster when you are doing things you like. How far can we carry this notion? I like to run with it, and think about time while dying. No one would really like dying that much. Perhaps when one is dying, time stretches out for you: what seemed like a split-second to an observer may be an eternity of pain for you.

That may sound like some works of fiction, where everyone simply stops in time at the point of dying, forever in a state of limbo. The concept, however, isnt that elusive to grasp, for we know that advancing into Black Holes creates almost the same effect. While in the case of dying, I postulated the dying would experience a lengthening of time, for the case of black holes, it is the observer who have that experience.

Titbit: For a spaceship which is advancing directly into a black hole, the occupants will feel as normal as any regular person moving forward into their death - crushing death at the end of this one. For any observer, however, who is observing from quite a safe distance away, the spaceship would never reach the blackhole: it will first slow down, then stop entirely on the event horizon. For more on this, you should read it up on your own and not trust any of my details.

My conclusion is that, dying may not seem to be the quick, painless event that the media portrays, the illusion that it is may have encouraged more people to choose suicide as a viable option than we ever suspected.

Radio songs

If you are, like me, one who listen to the radio every now and then, then this might happen, or have happened to you before. Particularly if its a hits station like 987fm, where new songs are introduced almost every week, where the chances that you might like a song immediately is quite high, then this almost certainly will happen to you.

Some songs you take to it immediately, like love at first sight, this is love at first hearing. Some songs, however, doesnt sound impressive at all initially, but after a few weeks, or a few months later when you hear it again, it doesnt seem all that bad after all. Maybe it brought back memories when you first heard it, or maybe things do get better after you are accustomed to them, but in any case, you got to like them eventually.

At the point of loving the song, most people would have the urge to own it. Either they buy it in cd form, or they download it, legally or otherwise, then immediately play it ad infinitum. And as most people could attest to, playing a song too many times, favorite or not, is the best way to get sick of it fast. Appreciation for the song will drop; what had seem like a revolutionary new way of expressing your emotions now appear more cliche than not; doubts began playing in your mind whether the drums/etc. may have been rather jarring than in perfect harmony with the beats.

On the other hand, if it happens that, for some reason, you didnt get the song (you might have forgotten to download it, or the cd shop ran out of the copies etc), gradually you might get to like that elusive song more and more; like a perfect heaven forever out of reach, giving you a taste of it every now and then when you heard it over the radio; tantalising, rather than satisfying your desire for listening to it at whim, ad infinitum.

In the end, you would have gotten the song by whatever means, then you realise that perhaps if you have gotten it immediately initially, the level of appreciation for it would never have reached this high, and you would never have stayed so loyal to it for so long a time. And perhaps, because of this interim, your love for it would have grown to the point that no matter how many times you listen to it now, you would not get sick of it, as like you would if you had gotten it immediately.

Human psyche works in weird ways. Or at least, mine does.

National Day

Nope, its not National Day yet as of now, but I did go to school today for some National Day Observance Ceremony.

Its really nothing much... went there to sing song take pledge with the old folks (aka NUS President, and alumnus). The whole thing lasted like 15mins... and i spent the night before rooting out my shirt and tie.. =_=" , not to mention 1/2hr dressing up and 1hr travelling.

I nearly forgot how to sing that national day anthem. its been like 5years since I last sang it? the pledge sounds funny to me too.. been too long. hahaa. had a short tea reception, then went home. There was only like 4youngsters at the whole thing, excludin the choir. sian.

confidence

There are two types of people in this world (I always wanted to write that phrase, but never got around to doing it properly), one egoistic, the other insecure. They both lie on the ends of the same continuum, of which somewhere in the middle lies the elusive point of being confident.

The egoistic type, in a bid to appear confident, or simply because it is in his nature to boost, always purports to preach and teach "the best ways" or "the correct view" to others (yes, I am well-aware of the irony here). Its almost instinctual at most situations, the egoistic would be the one constantly talking, telling people how they should feel, how the situations should be analysed, and how he's "been there, done that" and thus his ways should be more trustworthy. Rarely does he pause to reflect if his ways are really the best choices one could have.

The Insecure, also trying to appear confident, constantly insists on his own ways of doing things. Frequently being mistaken for the Egoistic, the Insecure does not, unlike the Egoistic, thinks that his ways are the best ways to do things. He just wanted to be different, to be confident of his own methods of doing things, resulting in him insisting too much on his ways and deaf to other alternatives.

The Confident, is not really a balance between the Insecure and the Egoistic, but more of a happy-go-lucky person who doesnt insist on his own ways, nor is constantly preaching about what are the best ways or paying lip-service to finding them. The Confident is satisfied with doing things in the best way he knows, quietly and without thinking they are indeed the best ways possible, and always ready to review his ways and measure them carefully in light of new alternatives.

Destiny

Only recently my mum broke some bad news to me. Or rather, some bad news for me, which may in all probability be good news for you, them, or the entire mankind.

Well, the story is that when I was still very young, my mum consulted a fortune teller about our futures (me and my sis). What the fortune teller said is something like this: I would have romance when I am age 24.

But the problem now is, as some of you would not notice, is that these fortune tellers go by the lunar calender, and we are in reality, all 1 year older than what our NRIC claim us to be. So I am already 25 years old by chinese reckoning. That means that my age for romance has past!

That wouldnt be so bad if it werent for a television show I watched when I was very young again (witness the corrupting influence of TV on young minds): the show's entire theme was explicitly that if you missed your yin yuan, then you are destined to lead the rest of your life alone!

Its like a window, a one shot chance at getting someone to accompany you for the rest of your life; once you missed that chance, you are going to be stuck on that train which goes chute-chute away without ever stopping again.

Woe be me!

On the other hand, not that I really believe all these stuff anyway. But they are quite fun to talk about.