Worries

"To philosophize is to learn how to die. That is because study and contemplation draw our souls somewhat outside ourselves, keeping them occupied away from the body, a state which both resembles death and which forms a kind of apprenticeship for it; or perhaps it is because all of the wisdom and argument in the world eventually comes down to one conclusion, which is to teach us to not be afraid of dying."

-Michel de Montaigne

For a while, I'd fixated myself on the problem of "What's the point of living if we're all going to die?" I had tried and failed to make sense of it, so naturally, I quickly took Camus's argument to heart (see Suicide). Life is meaningless, and that's okay.

Last night though, in a typical state of 2 AM semi-consciousness, I realized that I've been asking the wrong question the whole time. Because that first question isn't really a question at all, or at least a useful one. What's the point of life? There isn't a point. Simple as that. You either learn to accept it and move on, or you continue to wallow in your existentialist crises. 

I think the better question is this: "We're all going to die, so what's the point of worrying?"

Because why concern yourself with something that's coming anyway? It's not as if all the praying and prostrating and screaming and philosophizing in the world will stop you from dying. You might as well just stick your head in your shell and embrace the present (see Head out of shell).

The obvious answer is that we're afraid of death. We're afraid of what we cannot control. But why?  Why is it so hard to cast aside questions of purpose, of existence, of death, when we know that these questions are irresolvable? What good does it do to worry about what we cannot change?

As it turns out, quite a lot.

Granted, philosophizing about life's problems won't lead you to the answers -- those answers just don't exist. Just like how a turtle staring at the horizon will have no bearing on whether the ship arrives or not, there's nothing you can say or believe that will answer these things for sure.

But it's not all to waste, because in the process of asking all of these questions, something very interesting happens: you realize that none of them really matter.

I think this concept is ultimately what Montaigne and Driving with Plato were trying to get at. Not the interesting little details about how our lives are a timeline of check boxes and landmarks with a smattering of internal crises, but instead that the sole purpose of all this philosophizing is to accept the fact that it's useless.

Which, paradoxically, makes it anything but.

"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy."

 
My answer to that question, then, is that it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter whether life is or is not worth living, because there isn't actually an answer. And all the philosophizing in the world can't do a single thing to change that.

I think that's a beautiful thing.

Delusional

Probably because it's a straightforward conversation piece, pretty much everyone I saw this break asked me "How is college?"

I usually gave the same answer, though of course with some variation: "I'm really happy there, I like it a lot (feigned exclamation point)."

It's actually a question I asked myself a few times during the semester -- a preoccupation with the question of happiness stuck with me from high school -- and each time, I'd told myself that I was happy. Then when other people asked me, I would again say yes, I was happy.

The thing is, I didn't actually believe what I was saying at first. But eventually I did.

I wonder: maybe happiness is merely a form of self-delusion. After all, if you're deluding yourself effectively enough, it's not as if you would be able to tell the difference.

Dying

Sidestepping the political issues, I'll just assume that life begins upon birth. That means for whatever time you spent inside your mother (hopefully the whole nine months, unless you were Athena, in which case no one knows how the hell you came to be in the first place. Oh, what's that? You popped out of your daddy's head fully armed? I see...), you were presumably "dead."

So in a way, death is nothing new to us. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.

Now supposedly, there are people who claim to have had dreams about being born, even as they got older (I personally haven't). Plato argues that this makes perfect sense from a biological perspective; though we may not "remember" being born, it is quite plausible that we have not "forgotten" it either -- sort of like a fossil record of where we've been.

In our case, however, the endpoint of the fossil record happens to be the same as the beginning.

Which leads to a bizarre idea: the way in which we entered the world and wrinkled the dimensions of space and time from  nonexistence is, in a sense, the reverse of dying (maybe we were all given a Max Revive while loafing around inside our mothers or something. Who knows).

Granted, I didn't ask to be born. That much is true -- none of us did. But seeing as we, along with every other living thing on this planet, have already come back from the dead once, there's really no reason not to make the most of it.

It's good to be alive.

I think that will be my philosophy for 2013.