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.

Variable sense of humor

I've noticed that your sense of humor is not intrinsic to you; it's largely determined by who you're with at the time.

I first played Cards Against Humanity two nights ago with my high school buddies (Tristan, Leon, Kazi, Bang), and given the fact that our collective maturity level is right around the negative digits, the game turned into a massively inappropriate mess of sexual implications and graphic images. It was awesome to say the least.

Then last night I played the game again, but with family friends; I was the youngest of the group, and except for me, all of them were either graduating from college later this year or already did. Since the cards are all the same (and that I had just played the night before), I naturally remembered what kinds of messed up things we (the high school guys) had come up with earlier.

It was odd: things that I found hilarious with my high school friends just didn't seem that funny anymore. Simply mentioning anything remotely sexual did not automatically win you the black card. Putting down a white card that wasn't quite relevant, even if it was ridiculously funny, was a surefire way to lose.

As the game went on, I found myself gradually adopting their sense of humor, and by the end, I was picking the best white cards based on the criteria they had been using. But it wasn't a conscious decision by any means; my sense of humor just melded into theirs on its own volition.

This shouldn't have come as a surprise, though. Stick around any group of somewhat immature teenage guys and you'll eventually observe the "circlejerk effect." One guy says something mildly funny, some people laugh, then someone says something else, and more people laugh. Said cycle continues until everyone is yelling inside jokes and rolling on the floor bawling, while onlookers silently judge them with bewildered looks on their faces.

Given that, I don't see why the process couldn't go the other way -- the "anti-circlejerk effect," if you will. In other words, the all-too-familiar "no one else finds it funny so I shouldn't either."

Funny how I never realized until now that our sense of humor is really just another offspring of peer pressure. We laugh at things that others find funny because we want to fit in; we don't laugh at things that no one else is laughing at because we don't want to seem out of place.

And just like most things involving peer pressure, eventually you start to internalize it -- you adopt their sense of humor.

Laughter isn't just contagious because its in our nature: it's contagious because we are insecure.

A card

During the plane ride back home, I wrote a card to my mother, having finally summoned the courage to say everything that I had wanted to say.

There I sat, in between a middle-aged man and a young mother, crying as I moved my pen.

I don't know what to make of that.

Going home

As people started finishing their finals and packing up to head home, it occurred to me that I wasn't as excited to leave as everyone else. Most of my friends were full of impatient anticipation -- I sure didn't get the impression that anyone felt the least bit sad about the semester ending. I'm finally leaving. I can't wait to go home.

It's difficult to say whether their attitude was simply a response to the stress of finals (I don't think anyone can seriously say they like the finals part of college), but regardless, I found it a bit disheartening just how eager everyone was to leave.

To already be thinking I'm finally leaving after just the first semester is a bit sad, sure. But that second line, I can't wait to go home is what stung me.

I suppose it's only natural that people would rather be home than here; home is where we've spent the majority of our lives, and it's where our friends and family are (if only during break). But the thing is, while my friends continued to rave more and more about how excited they were to go home, I gradually realized that I might actually feel more at home here than in California.

I guess that says a lot about me, doesn't it.

But I will digress for a moment.

Over Thanksgiving, my sister pointed out that my mother had raised us to be independent; that meant learning to take care of our own problems, and first turning to either our peers or ourselves when the need arose. I can understand why: for someone as perceptive as her, I imagine it quickly became annoying to have to deal with her friends coming to her with their problems all the time. It was better to train us to become our own crisis-solvers than to spoil us with her own advice.

But I wonder if this upbringing affected how I develop friendships. In particular, I've noticed that I am remarkably whimsical about my attachments to people; it may not be hard for me to get attached, but given a little physical and temporal separation, my sense of attachment evaporates.

It's almost as if I only keep friends while they are useful to me -- once the situation disappears in which I had purportedly needed them, I don't see a reason to continue feeling attached.

I first noticed this on the last summer that I did CTY (which I wrote about before). But in a very disturbing turn of events, it may actually be happening for my own home.

In a way, I'm not that attached to my home anymore.

Well, shit.

That's why I felt so disheartened when my friends kept telling me I'm finally leaving. I can't wait to go home. It wasn't because I felt sorry that they hadn't enjoyed their first semester, but because I was so disgusted with myself.

Is three months all it takes for me to start making some other place my home? 

If so, something tells me I have much reason to be concerned.

Divine intervention

The more I learn about biology, the more I feel like the world is just too perfect to have evolved without any divine intervention.

I guess that makes me a deist.