So we’ve all been totally fine during the pandemic, right? ha…
In my case, i’ve gone through about 3 distinct intellectual ringers of annihilation and rebirth (funny enough, a post about that film would be a delight for this SR), and this is not something that needs a lot of extraneous words to make the point.
If you’ve not seen the show, it will basically sound like juvenile humor and screaming. I’m not doing one of those “you have to be smart to get the show”, but in lieu of the philosophical challenges and moments of growth throughout the pandemic, i guess i can give a bit of background.
A cynical man of no faith, a tl;dr summation of my philosophy was “there’s no point to life so have fun with it”, “being skeptical allows you to be cynical to protect yourself”, and “if I have low expectations, that will be the key to happiness. Well I transcended the last two in my maturity…
“Don’t have low expectations, free yourself from them”
“Don’t be skeptical to mine cynicism, be skeptical to find curiosity”
The problem came with the last one… “there is no point”, because during the pandemic my broken middle-aged maturity and lonely mind, a 44 year old out of work and the height of his career, was once again not suggesting “there’s no point to life”, but “WHAT IS THE POINT?”, at first angrily… what is this daily suffering and why? Then “Wait, does there have to be a point?”. Earlier, I think it was foolhardy to let my youth and naive notion of immortality to lazily use leisure as a shield from asking tough questions. I never had faith, I never tried to quantify meaning and purpose like mass or gravity. I thought that was for the lost, the searching, the lonely.
I am happy to ask that latter question of “What is the point”, but multiple times, and for too long, during the pandemic I questioned my lack of work and lack of purpose or meaning and rabbit holed on darkness. I was never near self-harm, but I asked “what am I even doing struggling through this?”.
And I finally came out the other end. Another period of that mental Phoenix… that work you do on the self to set the old one ablaze and rise up again, the continual regeneration and regrowth and self destruction and rebirth. But whatever mini intellectual midlife crisis I averted, I realized I had lost my way, and remembered that I had always believed the prime aim of life was self actualization, and without gluttony nor excess, to discover yourself through pleasure is far better than to find your truth through pain. that’s somewhat of a misquote of Oscar Wilde, but I remembered that living a life of leisure was the whole point…
We aren’t here for a reason, and one must wonder if we’re meant to fight to exist past our basest instincts. But we didn’t mean to exist, and then our life is the bittersweet of struggle in understanding why, or how, to exist. In fact, the existence of suffering might justify thinking of diversion as divine, and leisure as the only pastime. I often think about where our brains evolved to and existed in as Homo Sapiens, and that we sat as hunter gatherers for millennia. There, we found food after starting morning slowly. we accounted for our family and spent time looking at our setting and nature towards the horizon, a setting sun over water. The leisure time led to development of tools, of efficiency, of study of the celestial bodies, then math, then science, literature, curiosity. Then agrarian, then land, then stocks of food, then money, then inequality, and systems upon systems.
What if we were meant to be creatures of leisure, occupied by interest and fascination and growth and that civic desire to learn and grow and give back in ways that are meaningful that you understand and are capable of, vs being broken down and into a system that makes you mentally ill and full of fear?
I’ve been dwelling on this stuff my entire life, and I finally feel I am maturing into a far deeper understanding to sort of start a new path, of sorts, of getting my meaning or lack there of, knowing it’s simply the mission to just exist. When the boot is not dropping in a life of suffering, laugh, be with family, eat some food, read a bit, and watch a sunset. Do not fill your mind with things greater than this… but the deliberate nature of the attention economy won’t permit it. I think the people here are working harder against it than most.
BUT THEN I WATCH A ONE MINUTE CLIP FROM RICK AND MORTY that goes over my entire philosophical conjecture:
“Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody’s gonna die. Come watch TV.”
It’s insane how compelling a minute of a silly cartoon can be. I imagine people way smarter than me will be combing this show, and others, for far more fascinating insight and long form breakdowns.
But this clip has been a great moment in my whole process of living, and thought I would share.