05 Sep 2009
What if life is death is life.
And happiness is really unhappiness is happiness.
And love is really hate is really love.
Maybe we wish and hope for good because we are bad because we are good,
and living – even dreaming about being good is enough.
Maybe we’re all living in death, living, waiting for closure;
waiting for a start, for a glimpse at something different.
What if life is our way of coping; a way to make the intangible tangible,
because to feel the tangible pain
would validate and make life real and death real,
so that love and happiness exist and are true.
And then we wake up, realizing nothing is really as it seems.
That we are all happily alone and unhappily together.
And we’re enlightened that both good and bad,
happiness and sadness,
are created to conflict and to feed off one another.
To make each other real.
To validate life, to validate death.
Having seen Synecdoche, New York for the first time last night I was blown away by the truthfullness of it. It was ugly and beautiful and sad and happy all at the same time. It emphasises the imperfections so much that the perfections become imperfect because they’re abnormal, if not rare, if not non-existent. It makes one realize the beauty in connectedness and it awakens the soul, the mind, and the heart by shoving the fact that, unless we as individuals make life meaningful, life won’t mean anything. It’s bold, brash, and to many probably quite offensive.
It makes you realize that every second counts. I know I take seconds as nothing. Like pennies I usually toss them out or throw them away because they’re pointless. But what if I put every penny into a jar rather than tossing them out? I think that pennies are such a small amount that I’ll never acquire enough to use. Life presents us with a limited number of seconds to use. The more we throw away and toss out or pass by and the more we don’t use is a second we’ll never ever be able to reclaim.
Call me emotional, I’ll admit it. I think people tend to shy away from emotions these days. They stuff them in bottles, or bury them or hide them… It’s emotions that make changes in life. Emotions are the start of anything great and anything terrible and it’s the emotion that people remember. I’ll definitely remember this film. It’s truly life-changing, but only if you let it. I’ll close with some quotes that really stuck out to me.
“We’re all hurdling towards death. Yet here we are for a moment – alive. Each of us knowing we’re gonna die. Each of us believing that we wont.”
“Knowing that you don’t know is the first essential step to knowing, you know?”
“And they say there is no fate, but there is. It’s what you create.”
Life is beautifuil because it’s ugly because it’s beautiful.
26 Mar 2009
It doesn’t matter how tough we are trauma always leaves a scar. It follows us home, it changes our lives; trauma messes everybody up. But, maybe that’s the point. All the pain and the fear and the crap; maybe going through all that is what keeps us moving forward. It’s what pushes us. Maybe we have to get a little messed up before we can step up.
- Grey’s Anatomy
16 Feb 2009
Utilitarianism is “the idea that the moral worth of an action is determined solely by its contribution to overall utility: that is, its contribution to happiness or pleasure as summed among all persons. It is thus a form of consequentialism, meaning that the moral worth of an action is determined by its outcome: put simply, the ends justify the means.” I feel I’m very much utilitarian. When it comes to website design I believe (rather strongly) that form follows function. I believe that less is more. And I believe the web is and should be an extremely useful tool. Tools, as we know, are not full of fluff. They exist to perform a task or to make performing tasks easier and more efficient.
When it comes to my life, I tend to believe the ends justify the means. In a way, form follows function. All that really matters is the outcome. Are you happy? No? Then do whatever it takes to get happy by any means necessary. Maybe that’s selfish, but it is my life, right? Who should I be living for? Often this means you compromise more for the in-between things, giving of yourself for the greater good – the greater happiness. You back down rather than take stands. You give in rather than fight. Or you suck it up when shit sucks because you know that after a long bout of darkness, the sun will rise, and after being so deprived it will be the most beautiful sight.
In a way, you die so that you may live.
I was trying to find an opposite to utilitarianism, but got to thinking that there may not be one. Of course everyone desires to be completely happy, we just all find that happiness differently. Some ruthlessly and recklessly hack their way to the top while others find happiness in higher beings. In the end though, all that matters is our happiness. When we die, we die either reflecting on how happy we are or we die regretting doing this or that, or even not doing this or that.
28 Dec 2008
Sometimes I get to thinking about choices I’ve made when growing up. I think back when I was little and the trouble I’d given my parents. I think about situations I’ve been in requiring a tough choice in which I leaned on others for advice. I think about my future and how I’ll react when similar S
situations arise.
Being an adult means thinking for yourself. It means taking control of your situations and making the most of them. It means seeking out those things which are of most beneficial for you. It means to no longer rely on others to live your life.
Oftentimes we are presented tough situations which offer no apparent good or bad, right or wrong. We must decide for ourselves the path. These situations nobody can help with. Then there are other times when a war is waged between when we want and what we need. It is the latter that I think we find most difficult.
All to often what we desire trumps what is best; what we want outweighs what we need. The immediate positive is more appealing than the distant positive. The moment is more important than the lifetime.
It is hard to sacrifice things we care greatly about even if we know doing so will be better for us in the end. The multitude of christmas cookies my mother sent me, for example, are in no way healthy. Yet I crave them and many times more than a few. It’s hard to eat just one or two.
Or in relationships where the immediate fancy might not be best suited for long-term. And these, because of the emotional and physical attachments, are the hardest to problems to solve.
Happiness. We all desire to be happy and we all make decisions which increase that happiness. Nobody wants to live a life of incomplete happiness, even if that happiness is great. And nobody should have to.
We are all entitled to be as happy as we possibly can be. Each life is one shot at that happiness and every goal is meant to increase it. Many times women (and a few men) remain in relationships where they are not fully happy. This is not to say they are sad or unhappy, just that they are not fully happy. They, just as everyone, are entitled to seek fullfillment.
As you might know, I’m not a believer and the only faith I have is placed in two things: first in myself then not in anyone else. My life is made up of my choices, my actions, and my consequences, the result of which won’t send me to any heaven or hell rather into the ground or scattered elsewhere with the consequences of my life as a testament to my happiness and the happiness of others.
It is me; it is you who have final say of your life. Make choices which make you happy or make choices which don’t make you happy. In the end you are the only one who has to live with the choices you make. You can live happy or not.
“I have made my bed and so must I lie in it.”
05 Dec 2008
This might sound cliche, but what is the meaning of life?
I’m asking because, by nature, we as humans are selfish. In the act of self-preservation and survival we are selfish creatures. When we perform selfless acts we go against the grain of nature. In the beginning we are born alone and in the end we die alone, when it comes down to it. Therefore, shouldn’t life be about each of us as individuals? And then aren’t we entitled to be selfish?
(By saying we are born alone, I mean that we are an individual. Sure we have the help and concern of our parents and family, but they don’t breathe for us, they don’t think for us, they don’t live for us. Therefore we are born alone. And by saying we die alone, I know we might have that significant other; we might have family, friends, loved ones, but ultimately we stop breathing on our own, we stop thinking on our own, and we die. Alone. It’s really not meant to be dark and depressing – it just is what it is.)
I’m not a religious person. I don’t believe in a god. I believe we are no different than worms, or plants, or bacteria in that we are born and we die and everything in between is no more than surviving to live as long as possible. Of course, as humans and with a higher level of intelligence and with the ability to feel (which I’ll talk about in a minute) we create goals for ourselves – goals to be happy. These goals then become our meaning of life. But they are created on top of a primary goal, which is purely to survive. For without the desire for survival there wouldn’t be life. I could get into how man created god and all this other jibber-jabber, but I’ll digress (for now?) and get on with the topic at hand.
Now, many people attribute emotion to a higher power – a god if you will – but really emotion is nothing more than a created and inherited habit that we pass down in tradition to our offspring. Over time it has become such a common – and unintentional – quality that we have attributed emotion as part of our natural makeup. But emotion wasn’t always there.
Much like a bee sting, once stung we are terrified. Why is that? Or once we fall in love, we crave it. When we fall in love our body goes through a number of physiological changes. Adrenaline, serotonin, testosterone/estrogen, we sweat, we get anxious. All of these things mix together in the brain and the brain says, “Hey this is nice… do more of this,” and we from then on, equate love with good, and we crave what is good.
Just as with a bee sting. Our nerves send a message to our brain that says “Ow shit! Do less of that!” and we equate bee stings with bad and thus we try to avoid them. Did I get on a tangent?
Back to life. I wonder if happiness is even truly achievable. If, by nature we are selfish then we are always looking out for ourselves. This doesn’t mean we purposely hurt other people, but it does mean that if people get in the way of our goal of happiness, then we shove on. However, in the process we hurt others and if we are at all human, we feel bad about this.
So in the pursuit of happiness we inevitably hurt others which hinders our happiness. It’s like two steps forward but three steps back. It’s frustrating. It’s like a butterfly effect: you do something good but something else screws up somewhere else, even if it’s unrelated. Every choice has a consequence. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, meaning for every amount of good done, an equal amount of bad is done. Is there no way around this? And are we supposed to be okay with it?
The life of a worm is so simple. Crawl through the mud until you’re eaten by a bird, roasted on some hot sidewalk, fed as bait to some fish, or stepped on. I guess a worm is happy if they survive all this and that’s all the happiness they need.
Is this at all accurate or have I gone off the deep end?