Rasa

My reason is irrational

I’m always going to inhabit this strange island of not quite believing in anything entirely. The very tools I use to think with have instructed me that they will always be insufficient. Particularly because of one thing: how can I compare two tools without using one of them to do the comparison? 

Can’t be done. Yet, I prefer reason. And that is somewhat irrational. 

Perception of Time and Immortality

Remember when you were a little kid and summer felt like it lasted forever? And the school year seemed even longer than forever? And now that you’re older, things seem to move a little faster. Summer is pretty short. The school year might feel long, but that’s just because you hate it more. 

There’s actually a very simple reason for this: when you were 5, the summer (let’s say 3/12 months) represented 5% of your entire lifespan. When you were 10, it was only 2.5% of your lifespan. Compared to 15: 1.67%. By the time you’re 50: .5%.

Your subjective experience of time is related to the amount of time you can remember; it depends on the proportion.

That’s why asking a 4 year-old to wait until Christmas Eve to open their presents is a pretty big deal to them, but not to us: it feels like forever. It’s also easily demonstrated for us: telling the difference between 1 and 2 seconds is really easy, but telling the difference between 60 seconds and 61 seconds is hard. The difference is the same: exactly 1 second. But the proportion is different: 2 is 100% more time. 61 is only 1.67% more time.

This is one reason why immortality is nothing like you might expect. 

By the time you’re 500 years old, what would time be like to you? What about 1000? The days might feel like minutes. Whole generations may come and vanish while you feel as if it was just yesterday. By the time you reach 5000, 10000, 1 million years old, would you even care about what happens to a person who only lives to 100? 

Of course, it’s more complicated than this simple conjecture.

The human brain didn’t evolve to live to a million. Maybe it can’t even store the memory of that amount of time properly. Perhaps, there’s a point where your subjective experience of time stops speeding up because of our cognitive limitations.

With or Without Meaning?

testinggod:

I see a lot of theological posts concluding that a life without God is a life without meaning… some even imply that if you declare that life has meaning then you must be saying somehow that God therefore exists.

A story, a lesson, a philosophical outlook can all inspire meaning.

The things that make us human can elevate some, while at the same time bring others to despair. What do you attribute to providing meaning to your life?

They’re technically right. Actually, I would even go so far as to say that even with God, life is meaningless. The problem is in the question itself, not the answers. When anyone asks, “what’s the meaning of life?” what does that even mean? 

More or less, meaning signifies “purpose” or “reason.” Meaning, purpose and reason all possess the same feature though: they’re contextual or relational. 

A fork has meaning, purpose or reason only in a specific context in relation to specific things: food and people —> fork for eating. Anger and people —> fork for stabbing. 

We can also see that meaning, purpose or reason is something ASSIGNED by the observer, not inherent to the object. A fork floating in a void has no meaning because it has no context and no one to ASSIGN meaning to it. 

So religious people take it as given that God is the ultimate observer. But why should that be the case? We could take it a step further and ask what is the meaning of God. Being God, it would presumably have no meaning outside of itself, and therefore be meaningless. A meaningless observer ultimately gives arbitrary meanings to what it observes.

You could also ask the question another way: what is the meaning of existence itself? There is no observer in a state of non-existence to care about anything, so technically, there is no purpose, reason or meaning to existence itself. 

So as with many things, I would say the real problem is that people do not understand the question itself. The meaning I assign to my life is just as valid or important as the meaning a God might assign to it because they are both arbitrary. 

To be technical (again, in another way), a meaning assigned by God is no different than a meaning assigned by myself, too. For it to have meaning to me, I must be the observer in both cases. So they are equivalent in that I am the one deciding to “accept” or create meaning.

Myths of Self and Control

In our society, I feel we are overburdened by myths we learn about the self. We are immersed in a culture of “the Ego,” where there is a unitary conscious actor in total control. 

But the truth of our whole self sits in the union of our conscious and unconscious mind. In a sense, the conscious mind only sips at the distilled sensations of unconscious processes that filter and weave sensory and semantic data into a coherent world. 

The tension between reality and the Ego Myth is real and harmful. It is because of this myth that we pathologize our imperfections as Humans and disparage people who differ from ourselves.

“I told myself not to do that again, how could I just do it again?”

“Depressed people should just stop being so sad.”

“I can do this, so why can’t you?”

Self-blame, blaming others. In some fashion caused by our belief in the Ego Myth. Certainly, the conscious mind has some power, and we still have our responsibilities. But we have to appreciate the limited nature of that power, have the sense to forgive ourselves for our failures, and have the decency to grant others our forgiveness as well. 

Life

Whether or not there is a next life, there is absolutely this life. Figure out what you want from it, and live based on those convictions. Let it permeate every facet of your self; let it radiate from your decisions and your very character so that you may die knowing why you lived and not live just to die. 

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On life and living deliberately

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Thoreau, Walden

I’ve internalized the short phrase “live deliberately” so thoroughly that I had forgotten the source until I looked it up just now. To me, that short, sweet phrase possesses one of the deepest and most liberating truths of life.

Living is one thing. It’s fairly simple: if you are alive, then you are also living. Nobody chooses life; we are just born. 

Living deliberately is about agency, the capacity to act with intention. It’s about self-confidence, self-knowledge and an internal wisdom and ease. It’s self-ness without selfishness, ego-ness without egotism. 

To live deliberately is to make choices, be confident in those choices and accept the consequences without shame. A person that lives deliberately doesn’t dress themselves up beyond who they are for an interview. They do not attempt to be anyone other than who they are. Living deliberately means you exist as yourself and trust in the merits of your own identity.

Whether you stand or fall, succeed or fail isn’t the point. It’s about self-expression and choice. It’s about process. Living deliberately is the end, not the means. The world will fall into place around you, and you will simultaneously fall into place with the world as a mere result. 

Living deliberately doesn’t mean the rejection of fear or uncertainty. It means acceptance of the fear and uncertainty, and continuing in the motion of your self regardless. Consequences will come, but they are not the point. Self-expression of the multi-faceted, dynamic self is the point. 

Live deliberately and be free of the shame of self-betrayal.