Putting a name on the absurd
I tweeted several days ago something about finding it so hard to have genuine, meaningful experiences. Still not sure what sparks thoughts like these, perhaps it’s binge watching the first season of drug-filled toxicity show Euphoria, perhaps it’s the guttural feeling that’s kept me awake maybe a night or two each year. It’s a fleeting feeling, something that ebbs and flows, but I observe that these thoughts arise every time the world stands still for a minute, after every stressful couple of weeks or after a really happy and high event.
When I was mulling over this thought around 5 years ago, I tried putting a name on it: “existential loneliness”. And I guess the message resounds with every purplish haze rave shot in Euphoria. Or even the absurdity underneath all of the gore and violence in Alice in Borderland. It’s pretty much the same. The idea that well, life is meaningless for the most part, because we as human beings are devoured constantly by worlds which we can’t even begin to comprehend, describes it in the closest approximation.
Every day we scroll through thousands and millions of micro life updates from people we barely know, people who consider us close friends but refuse to make any effort to be actually friends of ours, and every day we’re bombarded with the disease of humanity: warfare, plague, discrimination, ignorance, and god-forbid unrealistic and toxic positivity. It’s getting exponentially harder to find meaning in the things we do because we’re flooded with everything, quite literally, and gasping for air, getting an escape, should’ve been good for us but instead we invented a name for moments when we take a rest and feel empty instead of morbidly full of content — “languishing”.
Thing is, those on this plane of existence/consciousness, my fellow alienpeople who have thoughts like mine gravitating as well, we can’t really blame the rest of the world for being devoured by globalization. Bigger-than-life forces have manipulated society to believe in a certain way, act like this, think like this, all to satisfy a clientele who operates the earth like we’re some marionettes. Must be frustrating to, like, find someone cognizant of this conundrum and refuse to do anything, to say nothing, and continuously offer themselves as libation for the thirsty, but it is what it is. This consciousness though just feeds back into the cycle of lostness, of being overwhelmed by the realization that 99.99% of what we see online and the things we do face to face are absolutely meaningless.
And it doesn’t even end there, for gods’ sake! The conditioning even extends to tHe ReAL wOrLd — whatever this means for the most part. There’s a preposterous obsession on satisfying our audiences online by the things we do in real life, for some reason daily living became profitable and suddenly being a basic human is congruent with “content creation”. Like, how is a picture of a burger from god-knows-where considered “digital marketing”. I reckon it’s just mumbo-jumbo, just some random crap a white male capitalist invented to make even more money and “drive the economy”, even if the people who make those burgers are dying inside and out.
Now I’m not trying to be revolutionary with this word salad of mine — but then again most people aren’t revolutionary to begin with. So many false charities and false causes that have empty promises online, so many desktop activists claiming to save humanity and heal the world by deleting some emails, it’s insane. And people ACTUALLY believe they’re contributing to a cause, not necessarily because they relate with or care for the cause, but because they feel good about themselves when they sign digital petitions or participate in Twitter campaigns (which are by the way echo chambers, so the messages don’t even reach the intended markets).
If you got offended by that, then the shoe fits and you might have to reassess what your purpose is, really. Haha.
At this point I’m just complaining. Humanity sucks and we’ve all brought this upon ourselves because we refused to be actual persons and instead relied on what’s deemed socially acceptable without questioning such norms at every step of the way. I’m not really in a dark place, more like in an empty one at this point, trying to find meaning in defiance daily. Some Camus dude said that vanishing isn’t really a good escape from all of this absurdity, but rather revolting on the daily, and sometimes it’s also tiring to find a sense of being whenever I choose to defy thoughts that arise, but I get reminders from time to time about it, which I’m awfully grateful for. Watching EEAO gave so much clarity, the idea of focusing on the mundane, optimistic nihilism, all got me out of my slumps. And yes it may be hard for me now, because of all this languishing, but choosing to see the smaller things in life instead of looking at the large things that swallow us whole — I guess is more effective in shielding me from reality. It’s blind, yes, but then again, we all are. At least in this case I get to control my meaning, and the meaning I place on everything happening in my life.
I hope I didn’t make sense, I wasn’t really intending to.
“Camus believed that once we accept that there is no meaning, the conflict between a desire for meaning and not finding one is resolved.” — Philosophytalk.org
