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?