OK, you get it. I figure my preferred title’s been taken, no doubt by some delusional, grandiose fool. Meanings of life are like, well, everyone’s got one. I’m not mad at them! Compassion is what’s required for those poor idiots. If we can find a way to feel like we have the answer, well that might be sort of irresistible, we don’t always deny Grandpa his take over Thanksgiving dinner, so no blame. Who among us who have suffered with doubt would deny one of us crackpots the temporary sense that it’s possible to know what’s going on? Even most atheists don’t try to take that from the religious followers, most of the time. Of course, folks don’t mind taking it when they’re trying to replace yours with theirs, but I digress.
The meaning of life is, you don’t ask what the meaning of joy is.
You don’t ask “Why are we here?” when you’re in a good place, that is the meaning of life.
You ask, “Why are we here?” when you’re far from home, in prison, in a lethal desert, on a sinking ship, at a Phil Collins concert – you get it. All life is sorrowful – but this is not an empirical truth in my philosophy, but a human truth, a human created situation. We make damned sure life is sorrowful, on purpose, if not completely consciously – that is the meaning of human life. Forced migrations, prisons, doomed ocean crossings, these things are not always Mother Nature. It’s human beings that make Phil Collins concerts happen.
You know I think I have the answer, that everything we say we do to make us “good” is what makes us tough and unreasonable, that the “punishments” that “deter” and “teach us right from wrong” are functionally actually abuse that make us mean and crazy and teach us to abuse in turn, just the sort of folks that when you live with them you start to wonder, why am I here?
I know, you were probably looking for some noun, progress, salvation – even procreation. But you can’t get there from here.
From here, the meaning of life is, how about we try to stop spending all day every day making our children and everyone else miserable so that they keep asking that sad question forever?
Jeff
July 14th., 2019
Abuse with an Excuse 
My little mouse turns the wheel on these types of questions more than it really should. I have a penchant for listening to other peoples stories. I sort of did the math… I came to the idea that there is no meaning of life. Life is plainly experience. Listen to an elder who has lived a full life or not , that is just a judgmental perception. You will see a story. We all have stories once we have lived it. There is no right or wrong way to live life.
The why’s we do what we do…. well sometimes you have the answer sometimes you don’t.
Trying too hard to fix something may have an adverse effect. I feel like I have a lot to say about this but also I feel I may be just shooting in the dark.
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I am living with the persistent delusion that I have broken through all the “no right or wrong way to live” – sure, we all fuck up, but that’s anecdotal. We’d like to SAY there was no way not to, or that it doesn’t matter or something – or you just just convict us all of being dickheads who make bad choices (I’m concerned with a particular sort of bad choices) that results in things being so bad “no way out” is easy to believe – damnit! I wanted to give you some time, but I’ve gotten a call, gotta go for a bit, later
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hahaha I know the feeling , seem to live the same thing here
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Sorry.
We’d like to SAY there was no way not to, or that it doesn’t matter or something – or you just just convict us all of being dickheads who make bad choices (I’m concerned with a particular sort of bad choices) that results in things being so bad “no way out” is easy to believe – like I do. But I still try to apply some compassion and understanding after that – so, no, sorry, there probably IS a way not to, there probably WAS a way not to fuck up. It’s the difference between something just never happening by chance, because of very long odds and something never happening because it is specifically and flatly impossible. We are all fuckups, all sinners by very long odds, I insist, not necessarily, not in some way that could add up to ordained or some shit.
Functionally the same situation, I suppose, maybe “ordained” enough for YOU, kinda thing (YOU meaning humans). But different in that a solution is possible and we should try, which is where I fancy myself.
So far, my answer is, everything’s upside-down, what’s “good” is bad and what’s bad is good! (Dylan, Idiot Wind. “You’ll find out, when you reach the top – you’re on the bottom”) I feel now that we haven’t even tried to fix anything, not really, we say we want peace, then we beat someone up to make it happen – this is not trying eternally and failing against some world God set up, this is lying and never trying even once. (The Expanse – “Just once, can’t we try something else?”)
That’s the state of the art of my philosophie, age 58.
Cheers, Z!
(despite my message)
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I was digging through some old drives last year and I found some files that were audio of Douglas Adams reading The hitch-hikers guide, or two books of it. I’d play it on my phone while I was smoking weed and looking at the stars in the outback. That’s as good as I can come to the meaning of life. E8 Lattice, Strings, supersymmetry dunno if we’ll ever crack the how, but the why?
I regretted my life for a long time, it seemed to get worse when I tried to fix it but I persisted and now I’m fine, sometimes happy, often busy doing things I never thought I’d actually do.
I’m almost 30 now and everyone tells me that’s still young but I’ve lived through a lot more than most people have. I just want a quiet life, books, stars and a dog maybe, when I finally get an actual post. And pot, I fucking love pot.
x
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but but but you are still young 🙂
Once you reach my age tho and Jeff’s … especially Jeff’s you will look back and say “nope , I wouldn’t go back”
All the baggage s of youth are pretty heavy. If you learnt anything you carry a much lighter load,
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And my butt is still my best ass-ette 😀
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Bunns and Punns dear 🙂
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Better than nones and nuns Monsieur 😉
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as in None of my business?
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No it just rhymed 😛
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I think I got that 😉
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😛
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what am I saying, some grandiose fool?!?!!
It was bloody Graham Chapman, wasn’t it?
– my bad.
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Not sure its way b.c.(m)e. all I know is that Phil Collins is the Antichrist – the atheist one.
I did like that – no one asks the meaning of joy, not much of that around these days in any place. Which is why I do what I do -because. I thinkt that probably makes as much sense as 42 right?
Bad is always more fun than good.
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so that’s why I became a waiter! LOL
Yeah, this is a passable bit of philosophy, but a damned solid Phil Collins joke, my opinion.
Yeah, Adams was fun, but he’s one of these duplicitous humans too. I tried his method, I get forty-ONE five times as often as 42. I know to a novice, that SOUNDS close, but you and I know it’s not.
(It’s the difference between Bush the First and Wild Bill Clinton, innit?)
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I sometimes wonder if he was having a dig at people who look for some message in Pi, or crap on about the Fibonacci sequence, actually if I’d have written it I’d have said that the meaning of life was buried in the fine structure constant but every physicist would say that, mathematicians have their faves.
I feel sorry for the Clintons – the first bush was a monster – the second and idiot now we have trump and the Clintons are bad?
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