"Kids these days" and Time

So I'm thinking that every decade I'm going to make a post like this to wax melancholy about how I'm getting old.

"But Dylan... you're not old."

Shut up.

I'm old enough to where everyone younger than me looks 13 but everyone older than me looks 29+. I'm old enough that I can actually say stuff like this but still young enough to have an endearing innocence about me (especially if I'm ever wrong). I'm old enough so that I can do cool stuff with the adults (since 21 grants you the last of the cool legal rights) but young enough that I'm still kinda hip and kinda cool and kinda in tune with these generational changes in culture.

Anyway, this post started off as one of those "oh things are different and stuff" kinds of posts but I imagine that's really not necessary for those who are in the very least bit aware of how things are. And this definitely isn't one of those 2012 posts (because believe me, that's coming) but it's one of those "things are just different" kind of posts.

I sit around and reflect on time (my own aporia of time, if you will) and think about how I've been around for just over two decades and things have changed a lot in the ways that the world works and in the way that I am. It's weird because I remember distinct events from my past and I think about the ways I've changed and it's amazing how I don't feel like an adult. In many ways I feel like the same kid I've always been and I wonder if that's how everyone feels--if everyone just imagines themselves as that same 8 year old swinging from tree branches and not knowing a thing about things and how anything is.

I suppose this post is going to be kind of short because I lost the point of it a long time ago but it will hopefully in it's vagueness spark some sort of independent thought about following posts considering memories and of course a 2011 wrap-up/2012 prediction post.

I just wonder how the future is going to be. Who is going to be in it, how my experiences will shape me... I just am totally uncertain about how things will be. To put it simply, it's an abyss--life, that is. Life after college is a great abyss that I don't feel that I'm ready to face. Things are so structured until now and I think now is the first time in my life that I can name certain people that I wish would be a part of it. (Am I coming back around to a point?)

Do we have an identity before our teenage years? Are we just cookie-cutter preteens that like the other things that the other preteens like until we decide that we don't care what anyone else likes? Maybe that's why we develop personal tastes and then look back on what subsequent and following generations of preteens like and think "God, I'm glad I don't like that cookie cutter stuff" even though we totally did.

If you haven't caught my drift yet, my main field of interest is the phenomenology of experience which I know seems kind of broad to those who have the vaguest idea of what that entails but I feel like it's the quintessential something that defines us as human beings and something that needs to be explored and understood. Time passes and it's the fundamental measurement by which we measure our lives. Believe me, I know. I wrote a 15 page paper about it. Our conceptions of past, present, and future are measured by memories, attention, and expectation respectively. Without these we wouldn't have any way by which to measure our lives and by my understanding our lives wouldn't carry any significant meaning (another existential issue). The point is, we look back on the past and compare it rather unfairly to the present and look at past events somewhat nostalgically thinking that things are somehow worse (here's where it will tie into the next few posts). Whether this is true or not is kind of irrelevant since things are how they are (though the continental philosophers would disagree) and there's not a lot anyone can do but desperately cling to memories.

Again, I'm not 100% sure what I'm rambling about since when I outline these posts at 2am as I'm trying to fall asleep it seems so much more potent and relevant but as always I apologize for whatever confusion might have arisen from your topical reading of this and praise whatever errant thoughts might have organically sprung from whatever words that you have read. Look forward to more concrete and hopefully more coherent and cogent thoughts in the near future.

EDIT 1 (1/3/12):

So I was re-reading this in a better state of mind and decided, surprisingly enough, that it wasn't as totally incoherent as I thought it was as I was reading, though it does lack the content I was hoping for. Hopefully this will fix that.

I used to be different. I used to be a quiet kid who didn't know what he wanted all the time but wasn't really all that concerned because time wasn't anything more than when I had to go to bed or get up for school and the future wasn't anything more than the teacher workday or the looming colossus itself: summer break. I used to think that people's opinion was based entirely on how fast you could run or whether or not you scored a run in kickball and we're all just going to kind of stay young and go to school together.

I thought girls were little more than cute things that that I wanted a girlfriend for some reason. The only music that existed was either the music in the movies or on the channels I watched or my parents music which was inherently not as good and never could have been (it was just noise and people screaming about stuff I didn't understand). Similarly movies were just things where people talked and it looked kind of real and they would often say stuff that I didn't get but my parents laughed so I laughed along like I got the joke.

Friends were people that lived close to you or went to the same school that thought you were cool too and you could share secrets about other students with and the group you were seen with defined you only as far as the gossip that was spread about any particular member--kind of like your group was only as the strong as the rumors about any one of you. Most importantly, my parents were just things that had jobs and money and things called bills and that's just how they've always been. They just annoy me when I'm trying to talk on the phone or play video games and they keep telling me to go to bed or do my homework but I need them to drive me places so I put up with their crap in exchange for being able to hang out with my friends--and that's how it will always be.

Not much has changed.

Nostalgia is a sticky mess that is easy to get trapped in and harder still to get out of and it's not something that I have to deal with anymore. Blame it on the meds or finding new, better things but I've been finding it easier and easier to throw old stuff away because it doesn't seem as important. Magical veils that surrounded memories have decayed and I now see them in different lights and most of them are therefore much less significant than I originally thought. That doesn't mean necessarily that they have objectively decreased in significance it's just that I guess I don't remember them in the same way anymore and what bothers me is I'm not really sure how I'm supposed to think about anything in my past.

I know that's kind of nutty to think about but if you consider that like newly opened wounds, memories are so much more potent and significant in direct proportion to their events of origin. That is, we cling to them with desperation relative to when they happened. For example, you never want to forget your first kiss between you and the person who just broke your heart because you feel like if you don't think about that memory constantly it will be like it never happened. Which I suppose is, in a way, true.

You look back on how silly you were to cling to things that in retrospect seem pretty insignificant and wonder how you could have been so naive to not anticipate much more significant events in your life. Again, we find ourselves at a Catch-22 since memories are always more significant than your predictions of what will happen in the future. Some might disagree but my evidence for this is in the idea that the future terrifies us so, as always, we cling to the known. What's more known to us than the past?

But what I find when I shake my head at high school kids in their skinny jeans and stupid hair and laughing obnoxiously loud about something that I probably wouldn't find funny is that I know that was me and I'm sure someone did that when they saw me and my idiot friends trolling about the mall. While everyone comes to that realization I think what is most surprising to me is that our perception of different generations changes as we learn more not only about our own lives, but the lives of others. By gradually filling the shoes of our parents we outgrow the shoes of our youth and wonder how they could have ever fit us. We shake our heads maybe not because we don't like their clothes or their music but more so that we don't understand what it's like to be them anymore. The memories we have of doing the things they're doing seem insignificant compared to our more recent experiences of more important things so we shake our heads saying, "they don't even know." That was a complicated sentence. Let me see if I can rephrase... Well, I can't.

Maybe it just has to do with not being able to remember how impressed we were with ourselves and doing things that in retrospect were kind of lame. Who knows. We seem as a culture kind of fixated on how things are always getting worse. In many ways, they are. Objectively speaking. But in many ways things are just changing which isn't inherently bad. Humans tend to be reactive and I think things will turn out okay as they always do.

On Creativity and the Artist

So I've made a realization... or at least a decision. Perhaps one based on the other.

Growing up we're really only told about a fraction of what life is really like. Before I continue I understand your apprehension to attribute to me any sort of legitimate knowledge of what life is really like; I think that a 21-year old college senior facing the abyss of adulthood has an interesting vantage point from which to base their views on. That said, I believe I know what I'm talking about.

Anyway, when we're growing up we're told that we're going to finish high school and go to college and then go to grad school and get a white collar job doing sort of kind of what our parents do or at least what our friend's parents do. It's like the the weirdest modified form of an agrarian/Old-world kind of view. And for a while I thought that's what I was going to do too. I thought I was going to go to college and do pretty well and then go to law school and become a lawyer for the vast majority of my life and then I'd retire and die. While this is still a possibility, I'm getting the feeling that this isn't necessarily the path that I should be on.

Again, they tell you as a kid that this is kind of what you're supposed to do--goading you into the maths and sciences or specializing in something like international politics (which seems like a really fancy way of saying you watch the news a lot). But they never really tell you that it's okay to not strive for a mid- to high-paying white collar job because I guess if they told everyone that then no one would. But what about the people that can't or know they just don't want to? You never get that encouragement to pursue passions or the arts. [Though don't get me started on the public school system not encouraging the students to pursue anything... because they don't.]

What college has taught me more than anything else (and here comes the point), is that I'm good at a lot of things. Before I get branded narcissistic, I want to qualify that by saying it taught me that I'm good at a lot of things I had never before imagined I would be good at. I've become something of an actor and consider myself pretty good at it. Someone told me yesterday for the first time in my life that my singing voice was beautiful. Beautiful? That made my life. I never philosophized before college or wondered about the nature of things. I didn't observe people or read Sigmund Freud for fun. I've come to realize that I am a creative person--that I look at things differently and have different capacities than many people.

But I'm sitting here just talking about my talents, I'm getting at the fact that maybe, just maybe, white collar work isn't for me. I'm not saying I'm going to be a vagrant. I'll work. But what I am saying is that I'm okay with only getting by as long as I have time to stretch my creative limbs.

If my parents are reading this, I'm sorry. I feel like I just came out of the proverbial closet and now they're sitting at the computer shaking their heads thinking they could have done something different and maybe I wouldn't have turned out this way. Then again maybe they would prefer I wear dresses as long as I'm still an accountant or a lawyer. I'm kidding (halfway). But why can't this be okay? Why isn't it okay to be an artist? Or a philosopher? Or a struggling anything?

It is okay. No one is saying it's not. But you look at people who work in grocery stores or are career baristas or waiters and you think, Wow that's sad... guess they never had a chance to go to college. Why does that have to be the mindset? Maybe they love their jobs. Or maybe they hate their jobs, they just love not having to take their work home with them or work 80-hour work weeks. Maybe they love interacting with people and don't care about living paycheck to paycheck. Again, no one is saying it's not okay for someone to live like this, but I want to see if maybe we can look at it not so much as them being deficient in some way that others are not, but instead that this is who they are and that's all they can be.

I love philosophy. Obviously. Nothing gets me going like a debate over human nature or political philosophy or even metaphysics. I think the most snide comment I get about being a philosophy major is, "What, are you going to be a philosopher?" My response is, "Yeah, why the heck not?"

I think this world needs creative people (and here comes the second point.) Yes, of course we need people to do politics and science and farming and accounting and all that stuff. But humans are the only species with the capacity for upper-level reasoning and temporal memory. We measure our lives through memories and the passage of time and we plan and we love and we create. We are the only species who seek to find meaning in our lives and constantly seek to find our true nature. Sure, I would love to make a ton of money grinding numbers or trying cases, but I'm not ashamed of being a human being who loves to think and be creative--even if that means not making a lot of money. This is just who I am. I know it seems like a cop-out to say that I want to spend my life enjoying being human because you can do that all the time. But what I do know for sure is that I don't regret anything. I don't care what people's perception of a good life is. No one should.

It's like I said--life is an abyss. You fill it with whatever you want. Some just tend to add more color than others. Me? I couldn't do without it.

Futility

Sometime last week I started writing a post that I thought was rather good--potent, relevant and all that. Anyways, I was just working on it and I realized I had no idea what I was talking about when I wrote it.

And that's really the point of this post: what am I doing? What am I talking about? I don't even read crap like this in my free time, why should anyone else? Makes me wonder what people do read though--if they read, obviously.

Should people read philosophy? No.

Philosophy leads to lucidity and lucidity can be a dangerous thing if you're anything like me.

I suppose putting my opinions on this blog and on my internet radio show is a lot like screaming them into a wind tunnel--no one will ever hear them.

Which leads me to the word of the day: Futility.

Expecting perfection

It's safe to say that we're brought up with certain expectations about our lives. We grow up with our parents as a model--a house, a job, a spouse, a car--a whole life leading to the success the led to you. But there's a bit of a gap between having and not having and I think it takes some time to realize that--maybe for some, more than others.

But after time we kind of develop an uneasy contentment with a lack of material comforts. We go off on our own, accepting moderate destitution (as only upper-middle class white kids can do) in hopes that one day we'll have the job and the money to live as comfortably as we would like.

The only thing we never really seem to reach a similar level of comfort on is relationships. Blame it on Disney or the media or romantic comedies or whatever, we have this level of expectation about who we want to be with. There's an expectation for the palpable chemistry from the first glance and then just a series of perfect interactions that leads to that magical first kiss and then... who knows.

We want them to be just like us but not enough like us that we hate them. We want them to be like our parents (Freudian style) and be liked by our parents but not so much that we hate them. We want them to like the same music but not all of the same music but definitely like the same kinds of movies because god knows we don't want to watch crap movies with them unless we both think they're crap. We want them to be talented yet endearingly flawed, confident yet endearingly insecure. We want them to be as smart as us but not dumber or smarter than us because we don't want to feel like we're constantly being one-upped.

We want someone beautiful but accept that beauty is subjective (sometimes). Actually, physical beauty seems to be affected by what we know of the person. Like a series of filters or something, the more we know about a person (for better or worse), the more differently we view them. We learn a bad thing they've done and all of a sudden they're less attractive. Or you learn something really adorable about them and now they're much more attractive. Then as soon as the relationship is over, the filters are removed... or are they? Maybe it's chemical but I think it's all psychological.

We tell ourselves that we'll accept the perfect person and all of their flaws but when we meet anyone we pry open those flaws and make them more than the are--we expect existence before essence or to fall in love before the flaws.

We've got an image in our head of a person. We don't know who it is but we love them deeply and fully. Whether we realize it or not we compare everyone to this person and when we find a good match, we latch on. This seems great and all but the subconscious of a human is anything but fallible. We are open to so much more suggestion than we realize and adding onto the fact that we're incredibly self-destructive, how could we ever know what's really good for us?

I've always viewed relationships as an empirical and mechanical study of people and their qualities, but I think it should be viewed more as a chemical reaction--a rush of neurochemicals as unique as a snowflake... or whatever. And I think the exact ratio of whatever chemicals are flying between your synapses is always different depending on the person. And maybe, just maybe--a certain mixture of stuff causes attraction. Maybe, just maybe, a different mixture of stuff causes love--if that even exists.

It's a lot like the nature/nurture thing in psychology--a question that we will never ever know the answer to. Do we fall in love because we expect to? Or because we can't help it? Is our attraction determined by chemicals or by previous experience? Most people would say both, in both cases. But I can't make that call since it could go either way.

But I think my overarching point is that our expectations are likely to tend to cloud our perception of things. In fact, it's kind of hard psychological theory that they do. Not that there's anything we can do about it. We just learn--because our expectations are usually just that: figment's of our imagination and not really grounded in any sort of logical reality. I'm just saying... life and people aren't perfect. It's just how it is. We all know that. Unrealistic expectations can cause you to miss what's in front of you. I'm not saying goals are bad things to have because what you should expect is a certain standard of what you realistically deserve. Everyone should have a place to live with a sustainable job and someone to be good to them and love them. But its important to not have your head in the clouds looking for something better.

It's funny because I think a lot of my contemporaries are starting to realize the worldly limitations when it comes to jobs and a future. These are rough times we live in and think the idea that we were going to graduate from college and have a sweet job was kind of unrealistic. Maybe not at the time--but it certainly isn't as much of a reality now. I'm starting realize my own limitations and what I can and cannot do; what I didn't set myself up to do; how all of my mistakes compound to make up the reality that I live in. I say mistakes because you don't ever realize anything is wrong until it comes up. All of a sudden you realize that the way you thought things were going to turn out... well... didn't.

You were just expecting perfection.

Agoraphobia and Xenophobia

You know, I can't imagine being afraid of both going outside and foreigners. Even if you're able to go outside, everyone is terrifying. Regardless, I think having either would be a terrible way to live. [This of course is coming from someone who has neither--who is looking in from the outside so what do I know] If you're xenophobic, how does anyone go from stranger to friend? I understand being terrified of Mexicans, the Chinese, or the British (because they're foreign you terrible person) but what about the guy down the street? Everyone is foreign.

"Oh Dylan," you might be saying to yourself, "I see what you did there. You tied this post back to your previous one. You're a genius."

Thanks. I try. But that's not what this post is about. I just got back from London (sort of) and being around all those foreign people (The Brits, obviously) made me think a lot about the world and how we view foreign people. Okay, when I say foreigners I simply mean people from another country. It could be the way anyone views anyone else.

We generally accept the idea that most people in the world hate us. That wherever we go, people are going to hear our crass, yankee accents and automatically make assumptions and judgments about us. You know how I know they do that? Think about British people. Who comes to mind? For me, it's Emma Watson, Jason Statham, and Maggie Thatcher. In my head, every single British citizen is one of those people. And honestly, I get off the train at Paddington and I hear the accents and that's really all I hear. I hear exactly what Hollywood and the movies and media have told me British people are like. So it's interesting when a British person does an American accent or impression because 9 times out of 10, provided they're not being serious, it's going to be a southern accent with a lot of hard R's or something. But if you think about the average Brit's average interaction with Americans, it's in the movies or the media where they see us being indulgent and generally on our worst behavior.

And think that's where a lot of xenophobia and stereotypes come from--the media on the whole. If you think about what you see in our media it's all just scandal and gossip and rich people being rich and greedy and poor people on the major extreme of ignorance and necessity. The funny thing is--we know that's not representative of day-to-day life of most Americans. But of course, the media has to report on the extremes because they need ratings. They need to report on Casey Anthony and that senator sending picture messages to underage girls because that's what Americans sink their teeth into or something. Well the rest of the world sees that garbage too. Maybe, just maybe, the rest of the world hates us because all they see of us is us being absolutely retarded all the time or indulging in our animalistic tendencies all the time. Or maybe they just watch all our terrible movies. On every single double-decker bus in London was an advert for either the new Conan movie or Cowboys and Aliens. And honestly, that's the impression that they have of Americans.

Crazy, you might be thinking. But do we have a different impression of the British or anyone else in the world? Not really. The stereotypes we hold of everyone else in the world are based on the tiny instances in which we observe them.

But does everyone really hate us? I don't think so. I don't think that's the case at all. What do we do when we see a British person in America? We hear the accent and we stop and stare and triple-take and try to listen to what they're saying and doing and if we talk to them we're super interested about where they're from and we generally try to be nice. I imagine that when the average European (because I'll try to stop picking on the British) hears an American accent, they do the exact same thing because it's different. They aren't staring at you because they hate you (most of the time), it's just different from what they normally hear. Now of course they might hear you and instantly hate you, but that's like any stranger anywhere hating you--it's motivated by belligerence and ignorance. Or maybe you were being an idiot. Ever think of that?

I think if you asked anyone in the world what they think of when they think of Americans, they might say John Wayne, a Wall Street businessman, and a cowboy. (Sorry ladies.) But that's all they see. Like any stranger, if they got to know you, they'd like you, I'm sure of it. And some are just interested in your existence.

But what's with the fascination of world travel? (Here's where agoraphobia kind of fits it, but I was really just trying to stick with the pattern.) Well if you read Stuff White People Like you know that white people like foreign things. It's exotic and not as mainstream as american stuff. In fact, if you do read Stuff White People Like, you know more about hipsters and less about white people as a whole. Anyway, they have a saying: The grass is always greener on the other side. We always think that things would be better for some reason if we lived in a different place like Italy or England or something cool like that where we could be fashionable and around people with strange accents. The fact is, I missed America in just the week I was gone. I miss driving on the correct side of the road and not having to mentally convert everything to dollars to figure out what I was spending and being able to speak loudly in public because I'm not afraid of people hearing my accent. I don't know if many people [hipsters] realize this, but moving to another country doesn't grant you freedom from the problems of being American, it just allows you to take on the crap that people in that country deal with on a day to day basis. You still have to deal with stupid people, taxes, crap politicians, and the daily grind. It just kind of pisses me off when people tell me genuinely that they day dream of leaving America and moving to another country because they don't like something here. I'm not saying there aren't legitimate reasons to move out of the country like job prospects or chasing the affections of a hot European actress but what I don't understand is why some people are so desperate to get out of here. Being over there is going to be exciting for a whole twenty minutes until you realize that gas and everything else is super expensive (comparatively). I'm just saying...

If it wasn't for modern technology, we wouldn't know the other existed. Louis C.K. does a funny bit on people complaining. He's talking about people complaining about traveling in airplanes--how the seats are so small and the food sucks and it's boring and being cramped with people sucks and how security blows blah blah blah. Louis just says Hey! You're in a chair in the SKY! You're traveling in the air over an ocean! That's freakin' amazing! Stop complaining!

And it's amazing how small the world is. I can send instant messages and skype with family in England if I want and that's incredible considering how far that information has to go. I guess the point of all this mess is to just talk a bit about how we view the world. I don't think anything will ever change. There's nothing wrong with a little xenophobia, but check your sources first.

Relationships

I haven't seen Just Friends or its counterpart No Strings Attached but the concepts of the movies alone got me thinking about relationship titles.

I think we can all agree that relationships are one of the most complicated things in the world. For clarification, if you've latched onto the tone of past posts, human interaction is easily the most complicated thing, and a relationship is any interaction you have with anyone. Duh.

Stranger is a relationship title. It's a title for any relationship you don't have... Or at least not quite enough to be an acquaintance which is a word for someone who isn't a stranger, but not quite a friend.

But I think it's a funny thing how we have to define everything in our world, down to our interactions with people. Of course, we have to define the physical and non-physical worlds and morality and art and everything that we have but those things seem relatively concrete (even if the interpretation is not). But I think it's interesting that we have to define our relationships in such concrete terms as friend, especially because relationships in themselves are not concrete or tangible at all. They're based on oral and implicit agreements and are subject to deceit and fault and yet again, we define them so rigidly.

Point is, if you tell someone that you're just friends, everyone kind of knows what that means. It has specific limitations and right and privileges. Now of course, if you tell someone you're just friends but you're secretly physically involved, now you're just a liar. It's just a specific terms with such a universal meaning for something that could mean different things to everyone.

And of course there's the notion of best friend which is some imaginary tier of friendship that involves being more intimate than your normal friends merit and infinitely more intimate than with acquaintances but yet something about this person sets them apart and earns them a special distinction. Somehow adding the word best to a title gives it prestige and adds all these responsibilities and expectations. It's funny because becoming best friends is like dating... how do you know when it starts? A hangout becomes a date becomes two dates and now... you're dating? One secret between friends becomes three and now you're best friends? I don't know. That's more subjective than anything, like knighthood right?

Think about how miserable you are when you don't know what your relationship label is. You're sitting there at a movie with a girl/boy you like and you're not even watching the movie--you're only thinking What are we? Then you awkwardly say goodnight at the end and all you can think about is your relationship label because all of a sudden if you said it and agreed upon it, it would make things easier. And it's true. It does make things easier. When two people sit down and say a label, things are easier because all parties involved know what that label implies and entails. They now know without having spell it out what the boundaries and rights are of the relationship. If a boy and a girl sit down and agree to be just friends, they know that there's no emotional or physical relationship to be had. If the boy says, "Hey I like you," and the girl says "Hey I like you too," then all of a sudden the relationship takes on a label and the rights of the relationship are more clearly defined and no one has to spend $11.25 to sit there thinking about it for two hours.

I think Facebook has had an interesting effect on relationship titles. Obviously, everyone you're friends with (including the 200 people you may or may not actually know all that well) is going to know the instant you add someone as a relationship partner. It's going to be a big deal, people are going to "like" your new status update and comment saying things like "OH MY GOSH SO CUTE" and whatever and I think adding the social aspect does some odd and horrible things to a relationship. I mean, from my previous definition of the topic I would say that relationship-defining terms are strictly between the two people to decide. Obviously, you can share the good news but the terms friend, boyfriend, acquaintance, best friend, enemy are really just for you to know where you and someone else stand. Once you give that title it's pedestal on Facebook for everyone to see, I feel like it all of a sudden becomes a permanent memorial to the integrity of the relationship whether it's real or not. To be less vague, once everyone know it exists, it's existence is a social responsibility. People will notice if you screw it up. But then people are also privy to the intimate details of your life and everything just becomes very real when other people know about it. I'm not against having your relationship status on your facebook, but I say give it a significant amount of time before you put it up there. Make sure your stupid relationship status isn't going to appear on my newsfeed every week because it keeps CHANGING.

The fact is, even though we have these concrete terms with these more or less concrete deno-/connotations, relationships aren't that simple. Every term has an asterisk when it comes to defining how you interact with someone. Not to say there's anything wrong with that. I'm a HUGE advocate for defining relationships. Even if it can't be defined in a single term like friend, it's good to know what you mean to someone. Think about it. If you have any unclear relationships in your life, clear them up. If this means telling someone how much you appreciate them as a friend or if they've been upgraded to best friend status or even if they've always been your friend, they'll always appreciate hearing it. Of course, don't say it like you're dying though. Don't give anyone cause to worry. If you like like someone, tell them. Knowing they do or don't like you back is going to feel much better than not knowing. And of course, if this advice means telling someone you don't like them or making sure your relationship has clear boundaries, then that's what you got to do. Again, everything's better when everything's clear. Then you make sure you can say I told you when someone tries to say you've been dishonest with them. I know there's a few relationships in my life I'd like to clarify.

Death: Parte the Second

So I just got back from London. And by just got back I mean I got back Wednesday night and have been way too lazy to do this until now.

Anyway, one of the highlights for me was seeing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in the city on Tuesday night. Great show! Really funny. For those who don't know, it was written in the 80s or something as a kind of "what if" for two of the most significant insignificant characters in one of my favorite Shakespeare plays, Hamlet. Basically, Shakespeare says next to nothing about these two characters that play kind of a big role in the whole grand scheme of things so this guy wrote an entire play about them. It's kind of a philosophical look at issues of death and psychology and it's something I legitimately found a lot of interesting stuff in, as you would imagine.

Anyway, there was an interesting bit on death and why you should or should not fear death (this was as the characters slowly come to realize the inevitability of their own death and the hopelessness it creates).

Guildenstern quoted Socrates when he said something to the effect of: we don't know anything concrete about death, so it is therefore illogical to fear it. And that makes a ton of sense to me because a lot of my discussion of death was why it's such a crappy thing to happen to you. But it's a great point to note that if our fears are based on things we observe (through our own filter of experience) being contrary to what we value (that is, what helps us enjoy and further our own lives), then we logically shouldn't fear death because we really have no idea whether or not it's contrary to our lives other than the fact that it's the end of it. Now I understand that doesn't make a ton of sense but if you think of death as just another chapter of life (which it very well could be), it's really not the end of anything substantial. Death could be great.

Now many people say there is no God or afterlife because it doesn't make logistical or physical sense based on the world that we live in what with the laws of physics and nature and things like that. But my question is why should God or the afterlife have to abide by these rules? Why does anything have to abide by these rules? Why can't it just be that everything we know on this earth coincidentally follows a set pattern (see: Problem of Induction) and everything outside of our know earth follows a completely different set of patterns. With the limited knowledge of the earth that we humans do enjoy, why is it so hard to accept things that might not seem plausible on the surface?

I heard a quote in a movie the other day (I think it was Thor) that magic is just science we don't understand. Think about that.

Suffering

Suffering and Happiness are two sides of the same coin. Like happiness, we love it. Like happiness, we don't like to experience it alone. Like happiness, it's an integral part of life.

Being sad is a bit of a funny thing. It's one of the few fundamental emotions of which the legitimacy can be questioned and overlooked. It all starts at puberty when all of a sudden everything just sucks. Life sucks. Friends suck. Parents suck. School sucks. The world is against you at every moment and you're the only victim of the war crimes life is committing against you. I know, I've gone through it. Every song and poem about darkness and heartbreak seemed to justify this desperate feeling I thought I constantly felt and every little thing hurt 100 times more than it ever should have. But now that I'm older I see it in younger kids and I scoff because I know it's not legitimate sadness. Who am I to say? If all feeling is relative, if they experience these emotions as true suffering (as compared to the rest of their limited scope of experience), how can we say that it isn't?

But then we have legitimate suffering of all flavors, ranging from a missed connection with a stranger to the loss of a loved one. But you'll notice (hopefully) right off the bat, all of the suffering discussed thusfar has direct relations with people.

"Ah Dylan," you might at this point be saying. "I understand why suffering is relevant in relation to previous discussions. Not only because it's an interesting facet of human psychology to examine, but because it's another facet of human social interaction and social life. Very good!"

Thanks.

Anyway, human suffering is interesting to me because if you think of all the ways you can suffer, it all comes down to human interaction.

• I asked someone out--they said no.
• My friend moved away.
• Someone said they hated me.
• Someone said I suck.
• My parent died.
• My favorite show got cancelled.
• My life hurts.
• Etc.

Actually, now might be a great time to differentiate between pain and suffering. When I say pain, I mean physical discomfort. I mean stubbing your toe, burning your skin (accidentally), breaking a bone, having a stroke, a cramp, anything like that. You may suffer from the pain, but that's a completely different kind of suffering. That suffering is of one color and flavor: this pain sucks a lot. When I talk about suffering, true psychological suffering, I'm talking about the multicolored rainbow that is purely emotional suffering. I'm talking about suffering that's much more complicated, suffering that's woven deep into your brain and takes a firm hold of every facet of your life.

For example, you're in a relationship and it's getting pretty serious. You've been together for a long while and you have a deep connection with this person. Or so you think. They cheat on you. You found out from a friend of a friend and you go to confront your significant other. There's a dozen things going on your head. You feel hurt, you feel betrayed, you feel insecure, you wonder what you could have done. Whatever happens next, the only guarantee is that right now you're suffering. This suffering is a complicated blend of every single moment of your relationship with this person coming to a screeching halt. All of a sudden you're questioning every single tender moment that has until now, been a symbol of their love and affection. You doubt whether or not the relationship is genuine at all. Your confrontation is done and you find yourself alone. What are you thinking about? Everything and nothing. Your head is spinning with all of the thoughts going through your mind. You have regrets and questions--your whole world is upside down. That, my friend, is what I mean when I say suffering.

The fun part hasn't begun yet. The weirdest thing about suffering is not it's cause, but what it does to you. You're sitting alone, ruminating over this news, and you feel physically ill (potentially elevating the suffering with pain). Your stomach is in knots, you feel like your heart is imploding, you're lethargic and no matter what you do, you can't seem to pull yourself out of this hole you feel yourself falling in. Now of course, maybe all of this isn't caused by a crap relationship. Maybe the only thing that could make you feel this way is a family member dying. That has to be a suffering I can't imagine. A torrent of emotion and distress on a level I can't begin to understand. Regardless, this psychological state affects us physically as well.

Socially, it makes us do some dumb stuff. What's the one thing you're okay with doing when you're sitting alone in your room crying about whatever it is you're crying about? The phone rings and you pick it up. Someone's calling and before that "hello," you're ready to dump all your garbage on the pour soul who dialed your number. Even if no one calls, you send a message, a text, an email, a chat, anything to anyone to who might listen and give you sympathy.

Sympathy is a funny thing. We only really seek it when we're in distress. We swing our issues around with reckless abandon until we get it. We just love for people to feel sorry for us. That's the reason we post those dumb, passive-aggressive statuses on Facebook. We're dying for someone to say "What happened?" We love that validation that everything's going to be okay because for some reason no matter how many times we tell ourselves that, the sympathy of anyone is infinitely more potent.

Of course, I'm not preaching from atop my high horse because I'm as much a criminal as I am a crier (someone who makes loud announcements). My statuses and blogs would often be littered and saturated with sad song lyrics and a vague melancholy. But it's that attention and validation that I yearn for. When we're younger we feel like we're the only victim and maybe that feeling never actually goes away, we just cling to other people whom we hope feel the same way. We seek them out and we seek solace in our collective suffering and maybe, just maybe we'll emerge from it, finding something to occupy our time in a way that allows us to forget why we were sad in the first place.

Maybe it's also something about the public spectacle, too. You post a passive-aggressive status for what reason? So the person it's about will see it and all of a sudden suffer as much as you feel like they deserve? Or because others will see your indirect defiance of that person's transgressions and take your side? Either way there's something cathartic about a status like "I just can't deal with anything" or "Everything sucks." Maybe if your suffering is made public, it will somehow be on trial for all the world to condemn and hopefully that will help it's destruction in your own mind. I don't know what we expect people to say in response.

"I hear ya!"

"You stay strong!"

"You're a beautiful person!"

"Should I teach you how to tie a noose?"

Additionally, I don't understand death announcements on Facebook. Maybe I don't get it because I've never had to do it, but I don't see the point of announcing to all your 650 friends (which include at least several dozen casual acquaintances, your boss, and a hundred people from high school you haven't talked to in more years than you'd like to count) that your dog or cat died. Even worse, announcing the death of an immediate relative like your grandmother or parent. I mean, that kind of stuff seems a little personal for the internet. Of course, I can understand a personal message to your close friends about why you've been distant or why they should expect distance in the immediate future, but to announce to at least 300 people who usually don't care what you had for breakfast that your mom died seems a little insane. I mean, what do you expect them to say to you? It puts all those casual acquaintances in an awkward situation because while they are technically your friend, a sudden extension of sympathy might seem contrived due to the fact you've never really spoken. But I think we just like knowing that people know we're suffering. Again, I think a private message to close friends is more appropriate, but hey, all 650 of my facebook friends are technically my friends. Maybe this is just an opportunity at another sad attempt to quantify how many people actually care about me by their hollow attempt at sympathy for my loss.

I don't know. Honestly, I don't feel like people care. If you've ever heard someone complaining (or had a lucid experience in a conversation) about their day or life or talking about their personal suffering, you know that any discussion of the sorts turns into a contest of who can suffer the most. You find yourself in a situation where you've been listening to your friend complain about their week and instead of trying to genuinely analyze the situations and provide legitimate solutions to their problems, you're simply seeking a good point at which you can insert being late for work and getting yelled at or getting turned down for a date by a cute girl at a party. You find yourself not even listening to your friend as you build a case as to why your week was worse and you expect genuine sympathy in response. Your frustration builds as your friend deflects your complaints with another example of why their week was worse. At the end of the discussion everyone is exhausted and frustrated yet hopefully feeling somewhat cleansed of their freakin' issues.

Speaking of lucidity, I've really been trying to catch myself when I indulge in any of the aforementioned behaviors. Now before anyone sarcastically calls me a martyr or a try-hard or something, I genuinely hope to lead by example and if not, at least not partake in this behavior in the event my awareness of it. If someone is explaining to me their issues, I do my best to actually listen. If i'm about to post something stupid on Facebook, I erase it and replace it with a quip about my day or something. I'm not saying I don't have these feelings or tendencies, I just think that if we're going to suffer and we're going to force people to be a part of it, we might as well save our rare opportunities for a concerned ear for the times when we actually need them. If I feel like I'm about to complain about something that I have no right complaining about, I don't. Easy as that.

I try to make these posts as oriented towards the humanities as possible, viewing everything through a lens of psychology and philosophy. So I pose this philosophical question to you:

Would suffering exist without other people?

I say no. In a Hobbesian state of nature we have no ties to people--we live on our own in our shelter and we provide for ourselves. In this state of nature people are selfish and violent and living on one's own is the only way to ensure survival. Think about it: if we have no people in our lives, how could we ever suffer? There would be no relationships to betray our expectations or become invested in or lies or deceit or anything. We wouldn't care about the death of another. We would just live our short, brutish lives. I think it can be therefore said that people are the single cause of our suffering. But as I've said in the past, people are also the cause of our happiness. To have one without the other is impossible. You can't know happiness without knowing suffering. If we live in the state of nature, in these neutral lives, we can have no feelings other than maybe physical pleasure and self-satisfaction (which may or may not be a result of competition in society).

So the elimination of suffering is only possible with the elimination of people. That, of course, would never happen. So we deal. We deal with suffering when it comes, seeking solace in the arms of our loved ones. Like a pendulum that we put in motion, others have the power to relieve suffering and the power to cause it. From the moment we interact, there is the potential for suffering--we just hope that we don't have to deal with it as much as happiness. Many animals die alone. They wander off from the group in order to die alone. Animals can't experience constant suffering. (This will get touchy) They can experience constant discomfort and pain due to human abuse, but we are the only animal that can truly suffer at the hands of members of our own species. And that suffering is lasting and potent; though as I said, that suffering enables us to be happy.

Being human is a crazy thing. We are unique in the depth and breadth of our experiences. All we can do is strive to understand this short life we have and embrace it with all the faults that it may contain.

EDIT/UPDATE 1: I don't want anyone to make the mistake of thinking that I don't care about your problems. Obviously, if you just got dumped or had a bad day, I would love to lend an ear. I think anyone and everyone should, even if it's a stranger. I just had a friend message me with a very poignant anecdote and what she said/what I took away was that if we all just listened more maybe we would all have stronger relationships and more open minds and hearts. Of course I care. Death notices on Facebook are weird but they still touch my cold heart. I'm really not that much of a jerk--I just wanted to point out the communal side of suffering and how suffering alone is truly impossible (at least from it's inception).

Morality, Labor, and more Death

In recent posts I've talked about how precious life is and how peculiar the human condition can be. We're a social creature whose thriving and sanity is essentially determined by the presence of other members of our species. Additionally, we're the only species that can envision a future in which we exist, and a future in which we don't (which is incredibly depressing). The overlap is the idea that we try to fill our short meaningless existence with moments that seem to justify our humanity. Now, you can chalk a lot of what I call "mysteries" to be simple biological responses. We socialize to reproduce, we don't like to die because we will have a harder time passing on our genes when we're dead, etc. Of course, having 12 credits of psychology under my belt, I'm fully qualified to say that our fears and desires are learned behaviors that come with a more advanced understanding of our biological and metaphysical limitations.

But I'm done with that garbage for now. We'll keep it philosophical but we'll at least try to stay grounded. As humans we strive for the good life. Again, call it a fear of death or call it a natural tendency to just want a ton of crap, who knows. For Aristotle, the good life was living in accordance with happy mediums and moving as far as possible away from extremes. This we call "virtue ethics" and is not what we're talking about today. I think the point of bringing up Aristotle is to show that we as humans have tried to define our existence and conceptualize it in a set of rules that we can choose to follow or not follow. This goes way beyond the Constitution, mind you. This is called morality (which I thought wasn't the point, but apparently it is). This morality tells us that it's not nice to be not nice to people, essentially. But another interesting facet of the human condition (which again, I didn't think was the point) is that we can be cruel to people who are not cruel to us in the first place. There's a trillion examples but I'm talking about greed and more specifically, consumerism (big leap, I know).

People want a ton of crap. I want a bigger tv and a big stereo system and a huge house with a parking garage with some fast cars. Why? I don't know. None of those things are going to benefit me in any substantive way other than knowing I've got some really cool crap. Why do billionaires want more money? Because they can theoretically buy more crap. I say they can't be too busy buying crap because if they were, they wouldn't be billionaires. Billionaires are just really concerned with theoretically being able to buy a ton of stuff. And really, that's what we're all concerned with. We want to know that if we need something, we can take care of it. We also really, really like to know that if we want something, we can be impulsive every now and then. But our ultimate dream, my friends, is that if we want to be flippant and irresponsible with our money, we can. We all want to know that a gold-plated pool full of strawberry jello with diamonds in it is going to be possible if we want it.

So we go to work.

Humans are a funny sort in that we don't do anything just to survive. Yeah, some of us do and that's really unfortunate (says the upper middle class white kid), but most of us are concerned with how much excess we're going to have. After the bills and the responsibilities and eating, we want to know that we're going to have a little extra to screw with. We also really like knowing that we'll have even more extra to put away for when we're old and tired and pissed off at the world and don't want to work anymore.

I use lions a lot as examples for some reason despite not knowing anything concrete about them... well, here's another.

Take a lion pack. I don't know any actual facts about lions, but just bear with me. The male and female lions hunt because they have to feed themselves. They also forgo a little extra from that sweet, sweet gazelle to give to their cubs. Within a few years, the cubs are hunting, helping to provide for the older lions as well as themselves. The responsibility slowly shifts downwards as the generations age. The circle of life involves work. Everyone has to work.

The thing about humans that's very similar to lions is that the responsibility shifts downwards. The younger ones eventually have to take care of the enfeebled older ones. The only difference is, lion parents don't have to wait until their cubs are 22 years old to be able to sustain themselves, much less their elders.

But kids have to go to school now. You used to be able to get a job with an elementary education. Granted not a great job, but a job nonetheless. If you could read, that was a plus too. Years later, a high school education was acceptable but not absolutely necessary and hey a GED was quite alright. Years later, if you went to college (undergrad) you were set. High school education was necessary but college wasn't at all. More people started to go to get an undergrad education but those with the master's degree we're the elites. Now you can't even earn a "livable" income without a bachelors. You could get a master's degree nowadays and still worry about being homeless. WHAT'S GOING ON?

One of my favorite sayings is, "When everyone is special, no one is special." You know why? BECAUSE ONLY A FEW PEOPLE CAN BE SPECIAL BASED ON THE DICTIONARY DEFINITION OF SPECIAL. Don't you see? Once everyone is above the bar, we have to MOVE THE BAR. Everyone dreams of being rich but NOT EVERYONE CAN BE RICH. If you and 4 friends are looking a pile of 100 1-dollar bills, you all can share it--each getting 20 dollars. But you KNOW that one person in the group is a jerk and is going to take 90% of it. Now that means that the other 4 share 10 dollars which doesn't split evenly. So someone is going to get screwed. One genius in the group comes up with an idea: let's make more money! Everyone is super excited because they all get 100 dollars but now each individual dollar means less. Welcome to inflation.

The point is not inflation, obviously. It's that we all expect to get out of college and make a ton of money which just realistically isn't possible. A bazillion students (literally) graduate college every semester and they all expect to make all this money and it's simply not possible. It doesn't make logistical sense. Such is life. So we settle into mediocrity never making as much money as we would like doing something we hate and yet we continue to do it because we want to have a place to live and feed ourselves and have a car and them maybe, just maybe, have a little extra on the side to hopefully stop doing what we hate one day or maintain a modicum of sanity by blowing our extra money at a shooting range, putting up targets of our boss.

I talked a lot in the past about doing things for our ultimate survival--but the way we work is so paradoxical it's amazing. We work to survive, but we're killing ourselves but working so much at things that we hate. So why do we do it? Just to bite off a bigger piece of the pie so we can buy a bigger TV which will hopefully provide enough pleasure to justify the hours spent at the job you hate or the fact that your life is already insignificant enough without spending 40 hours of your 168 hour doing something that makes you unhappy.

Oh wait, that's 40 hours on top of the 30 minute commute EACH WAY. So that's 45 hours plus the 8 hours of sleep you HOPEFULLY get each night (but you don't because you've got too much crap to do) but let's say for argument's sake that you do get 8. That's 56 hours you spend sleeping so 101 hours of your life are either spent working or sleeping. Then you've got 67 hours of your week left to do taxes, cut the lawn, attend soccer games, fight with your wife, discipline your kids, and maybe, just maybe you'll have a few hours left to do something you enjoy--something that makes you forget about all of the garbage you have to deal with. But in those 40 hours you hope that you'll make enough money to put aside so that one day, you can hopefully devote an extra 40 hours to making your life slightly happier than it has been. The rub is that by the time that's even remotely possible, you're not young anymore. You've got arthritis and you're sight is leaving you and your doctor said you probably shouldn't be riding rollercoasters or skipping doses of your medication and really the only thing you can do is sit on your butt for what will hopefully be a productive 20 years of life looking back on all that could have been. You finally have the time to read Freud and Aristotle and learn the piano but at the point in your life, you physically can't.

And then one day you'll find, 10 years have got behind you--no one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.

I think thoughts like these are originally what prompted the post on death. Maybe my primary interest is not death for death's sake, but life for death's sake. If life is the most precious thing we have, we sure don't act like it.

But what can we do? What's the alternative? With the media glorification of the rich and famous we can never just settle for good enough. It's biological to want to be the best and have the greatest display of wealth and I think we're all inherently lazy--so lazy we'll work ourselves to death in order to not have to work anymore. Of course, you could always be a drug dealer. The hours are probably flexible, the money is great, and if you can ignore the constant threat of imprisonment and death, it can provide a lovely life for you and your family.

Death

It tops the list of things you're scared of.

There's insurance against it.

We have industries devoted to fending it off.

We have industries devoted to making sure it happens.

It sucks.

Ironically enough, death is an integral part of life. What goes up must come down. What has a beginning has an end. Every reaction has a... you get it. When we're young, we're immortal. Our entire lives are ahead of us and we hope to God and Lady Luck that our time is a long, long time from now. For those of us taking the more liberal stance, we act impulsively and do whatever our fickle hearts yearn for. If you read my post on happiness, you know that these kinds of people probably surround themselves with equally impulsive people and probably claim to be mostly happy. The more conservative of us will probably do things they consider safer and because of this will probably plan farther in advance, into a life that their more conservative lifestyle will hopefully grant. As the only animals capable of planning, we sure do a lot of hoping. We hope that despite doing a ton of dumb stuff, we'll wake up the next morning to do it all over. We hope that despite not doing anything crazy, we'll wake up the next morning to hopefully do something spontaneous one day... if we can get off work and don't have a dentist appointment.

The worst part is, it's inevitable. We're born carefree into a live we didn't choose and as soon as we learn about it, we hope to go out as carefree as possible. A pessimist says you're born alone and you die alone. Fact is you're born nowadays with a fistful of doctor around you and with any luck, you'll die the same way.

In my happiness post, I mentioned that we only do the things that make us "happy" in order to fend away sadness, to momentarily forget our meaningless existences and to hopefully justify this mysterious life that's been bestowed upon us. Well ladies and gentlemen, it's time to get morbid.

Look around you. Well, don't do it right now because you're probably sitting alone at your computer, you sad, sad person you. Why aren't you out enjoying life? It's precious and short. But if you look around when there are people around, what do you see? People! There are people out there and if you just take one minute out of your busy life and close your eyes (not when you're driving or operating heavy machinery) and try to imagine and conceptualize and spatially comprehend the idea that every single person you see or meet has a life of equal or greater size than you. Think back on your life and how massive it is. You've been to several states and several school and traveled to your grandparents and eaten a ton of food and met a lot of people and there's a lot of STUFF in your life. Well the person next to you has done all that too. The person next to you had a mom and a dad and a childhood and they learned to ride a bike and had a romantic relationship and found a job and lost a job and is now doing something they probably hate with their lives and may not be where they wanted to be and... and... their life is huge. Conceptually, it's about as big as yours and realistically, takes up about the same amount of space in the space-time continuum. That is, no space at all. The world has been around a long, long time and there have been a ton of people that have come and gone, each with full lives. For millennia people have watched the sun rise and set every day of their lives and they have all died and people are born to replace them and they have died as well. Your life is small and it is tiny and odds are, it won't really matter all that much. But if you literally took a moment to try and conceptualize that you'll know that it's a lot like literally trying to imagine infinity.

Here's a fun little exercise to help you do what I'm trying to get you to do. Close your eyes. Well... I know it's hard to read and close your eyes but... have a friend do it. I don't know. Just... close your eyes. Imagine a square. Easy. Four sides with 90 degree angles... no problem. Now imagine the number 1. Just the number. I just typed it, in case you forgot what it looks like. Now picture the number 2. See, I'm helping. Now picture the number 3 and then keep adding numbers in order. (4, 5, 6... etc.) If you're a good counter, you're getting pretty high up there... 100... 500... 823... but soon you're going to lose track of all the digits. Now you're a little overwhelmed because you can logically imagine a number with 30 digits, but you can't keep track of every single digit. A number like 5643482309482350948323 is really hard to keep in your head and even harder to figure out what number comes next. Now imagine your life is that number. Now imagine the person next to you (or the next person you see) is the next number sequentially. Now keep going. Your number is seeming less and less important. Sure, it's a long, beautiful number. It's your number. You're proud of your number. But there's going to be numbers after you. There's going to be numbers with twice as many digits as yours, with more exciting numbers like... 7's or... 1's. You never know.

That was fun, wasn't it? My point of interest here is why we do what we do. Why in the face of all things, we press on. We know it's coming so why do we do what we do? Why do we endure sadness and why do we do things that we hate? Why do we put up with people we don't like and why do we do things that we do like when we know they aren't going to last?

Imagine you're a serf in a medieval township. Your day consists of waking up at the crack of dawn and tilling and sewing the land all day. You might get some bread for breakfast and maybe some more bread for lunch. You'll till and you'll sew all day and you know you do it because if you don't, you'll die. You know this will be your life for as long as you live. You know that if you get sick, you won't be able to work the land and you'll die. Your family will die. So you keep working. Then one day, you die. Why did you do it? Why press on? Why accept this?

Everything we do is predetermined. I'm not talking about the concept of free will because I have different thoughts on that, but everything we do is predetermined. We went to elementary school, then middle school, then in high school they informed us that we have to go to college, then in college they reminded us that we have to become adults and get jobs and be functional adults. It's expected. Why do we do it? Why do we do anything?

I guess it's more of a theoretical question for nihilism or something. Why do we get up in the morning? Okay so maybe I'm advocating mass suicide... maybe I'm not. Just kidding... I'm not. But that's the most interesting thing about this: why don't we just do it? I posted a status the other day talking about happiness. I wrapped it up by saying if we had known this is what being an adult would be like, we would have offed ourselves a while ago. And part of me thinks that's true. If someone had sat us down when we were kids and earnestly got us to understand that we're going to be living on our own, doing things we don't like doing, and not having fun all the time... we might have seriously chosen the the red pill (Matrix reference--google it).

But I think that speaks heavily to the mystery of the human psyche... above all adversity, we strive for life. Despite knowing that life isn't going to be very fun and despite a ton of uncertainty about being able to attain this magical happiness we all hope for... we don't kill ourselves. In fact, we look down on suicide. In fact, if we commit suicide, there's something WRONG with us. While suicide seems like the next logical step to accepting our mortality, we consider those who do it the victim. Now maybe this attitude towards suicide is another survival instinct but maybe it's also a result of society telling us what's good for us. Either way, we're still alive but we're still suffering and we're still not willing to do anything about it. Go figure.

We even use death as punishment. Those who kill get the death penalty. We know that killing someone who killed someone else isn't going to bring the victim back, but for whatever reason it makes us feel better. The death penalty is supposed to be a deterrent. It's based on the idea that the worst thing that you can do to someone who breaks the law is kill them. That the worst wrong someone can endure is death. I don't understand this because it seems like the worst thing you can endure is life. Life is full of suffering and pain and death isn't full of anything. I would rather have an empty bucket then one full of rotten eggs.

Epicurus (who is the first incarnation of Ayn Rand, I think) says that life is the greatest good. He was what we call a hedonist but he would have probably just said he enjoys life to the fullest. And to be fair, life is something to enjoy. If we're going to be here, we might as well make the best of it (despite the pointless endeavor that may or may not be). Anyway, Epicurus says death isn't that big of a deal because if you can imagine a time when you didn't exist and be okay with it, you can imagine a time after you and also be okay with it. If a psychopath is an Epicurean (which would be HILARIOUS), I don't think the death penalty is going to be much of a deterrent. (Philosophy jokes are the best.) Thomas Nagel (when he isn't being a JERK and talking about philosophy of mind) takes Epicurus' view one step farther about 3000 years later and says, yes, death IS the greatest harm because imagining a time when you don't exist is freakin' awful. It's all about missing out on the future. I don't even think that really occurs to people--why death is such a harm--until they're staring it dead (see what I did there?) in the face. No one is concerned about the shortness of life until the end and I think that's part of the source of regret. But maybe that's also the reason people don't go around constant concerned about death. Maybe we shouldn't think about it. But it's such a huge deal, why shouldn't we?

Humans are the only things on this earth that can plan. I've talked about this before: we can plan, imagine a future, and it's even a unique ability to imagine a future without us. Animals don't fear death because they can imagine a future without them, a gazelle runs away because it knows death is inherently bad. It doesn't know why, it just knows. We would run away from a lion because we know that our loved ones would miss us and we wouldn't be able to learn to play piano or write a book or fall in love or crap like that. Also we don't want to be known as the idiot who got eaten by a lion. WE ARE HIGHER UP ON THE FOOD CHAIN. Not the point. We have the ability to know why we don't want to die which might be why we don't just kill ourselves. Again, I don't think that is sufficient evidence for why we don't. All we know is that being alive is better than the alternative.

This post is as much about life as it is about death. I've tread the thin line of optimism a couple times and hopefully it wasn't too obvious that I am a big fan of life. I mean I suppose if given the choice I would have still chosen life. I think of the people I've met and the things I've done and I can't help but think that none of it's permanent... but yeah I guess it's better than the alternative. Is is better to have loved and lost then to have never loved at all? Is having the heartbreak better than never knowing the love that heartbreak has to follow? I don't know. That's a logic problem I can't reason out. Things we humans do to ensure we continue to live is amazing. We will keep someone who is persistently unconscious with no hope of regaining functionality on a breathing machine even if means only prolonging what we think life should be. We will argue for centuries about what it means to be alive and what being alive even means. We are so concerned with mortality that when it comes to death, we fear nothing more. Yet as I have hopefully proven, doesn't the inevitability of death hopefully render all of that pointless?

So I guess through all the rambling... what you should take away from this discussion of death is not that persevering through the dark times is unnecessary, but that like a great party, life is short and is eventually going to end. If you can walk away from it with the best story, you win. And while the end is something you don't want to deal with, all you need to do is fill the time you have with the things you enjoy. Yeah, we rely on people for our happiness--people who can be mean, stupid, awful and selfish. And yeah, going to school so we can work til we die sucks a lot... but if life is so short and if the only thing that allows us to forget are the little moments of happiness, fill your life with those little moments. Proportionally, even the shortest moments of bliss are the biggest things anyone can do.

Happiness

Admittedly, I'm in the middle of one of the existential crises I speak so highly of. A good friend once told me that a crisis is inherently bad and in most cases, I would have to agree. But to me, a crisis also means that there is something wrong and whatever is wrong has come to a head and this crisis gives us the unique opportunity to experience the issue from the eye of the storm. Thus, today/this week's/this month's crisis gives us an opportunity to look at many interesting things that for whatever reason are coming to a head.

Happiness is one of the most interesting concepts imaginable. I'm utilitarian in that I believe that pleasure is the highest good man can achieve. It follows then that pain is the worst thing imaginable. Ayn Rand says that life is the greatest value for man, and that anything contrary to the realization of life is bad.

Pleasure takes many forms. Physical, emotional, metaphysical... pleasure is such a broad concept that it can take so many forms. Pleasure is also a funny thing in that, fundamentally, what gives us pleasure hasn't ever really changed. We always find new ways to experience pleasure, but fundamentally, it's always the same. But what will be discussed henceforth is the concept of happiness. To me, happiness is defined as the emotional manifestation of pleasure. Now the reason I say this is because using words like "pleasure" and "happiness" interchangeably can get messy. So regardless of whether you agree with my definition, that's what I mean when I say the word "happiness."

The main interest I have in happiness is the question of its source. Now, think about what makes you happy. For me, it's going out with my friends, performing, laughing, playing an exciting video game, or the perfect song coming up on my iTunes shuffle. Obviously, that's not a complete list--but it's something to work with.

I said going out with my friends makes me happy. Why? indulging in camaraderie and having a shared experience? You and your friends go to the movies and see a comedy. A great joke has been told and the entire theater erupts in laughter. You take a brief moment to look to your left and right. You see your closest friends laughing as well and you sigh deeply and sink a little farther into your chair, content. You walk out of the theater, quote the joke, and relive the experience of having heard a good joke. A few months later the movie will come out on DVD and you'll invite your friends over to watch it. Unfortunately, your friends can't come. They're busy with work or whatever. Not a big deal, you watch it by yourself. The scene with the joke is about to come on and you prepare yourself for the riotous laughter that's sure to ensue. The joke comes and goes. And you? It might have elicited a mild chuckle at best, but suddenly the emotion that follows is melancholy.

A wonderful blog I just stumbled upon is called the Thought Catalog which I highly recommend for those bored at work. Anyways, one of the articles I read defined melancholy as such: ‘Melancholy’ is separate from ‘sadness.' The concept of ‘sadness’ implies grief and a certain hopelessness, while ‘melancholy’ implies a sorrow with purpose, an emotion with which one can be swathed as if it were a shroud. Swathed – no, more like ‘swaddled’, and in that regard melancholy is comfortable, a lozenge to be masticated for a reason, a sadness that has pensive pleasure melted into it, something it’s comfortable to suckle and to be wrapped in... to be swallowed in melancholy is to be immersed in conscious, intentional unhappiness, the sort that, perversely, makes one happier."

Naturally, interpretation is subjective, but essentially, melancholy is not just the state of being debilitatingly sad, it's a comfortable sadness that one occasionally finds oneself in when one is purposively hopeless. Actually, reading that back, it doesn't clarify it all. An example would help... maybe... it's when you try to relive an experience in your head, but the happiness of the memory is so fleeting and seemingly far off that only then do you recognize that it's gone. I think that's why we enjoy reminiscing so much. We sit around with our friends sharing those "remember that time when..." stories because we want to be able to transport ourselves back in to the moment when we were happier than we are now. Sadness is what you feel when you lose a family member or... well I can't think of another example. But you get it. Melancholy is this state of experiencing the absence of happiness from the eye of the storm. It's not a debilitating hopelessness, but it's not a joyous feeling either. Like the quote, it's something to wrap yourself in or a lozenge you chew for a reason.But you also must notice that I can't talk about happiness (or at least haven't thus far) without talking about people. Like cold being the absence of heat or darkness the absence of light, sadness is the absence of happiness. So if you're not doing the things that make you happy, are you sad? Or maybe that's melancholy.

Anyway, so much of what makes us happy seem to come back to our good friend Maslow, a psychologist who I readily subscribe to. Good ol' Abraham Maslow put together this handy little pyramid called the hierarchy of needs which orders our fundamental needs from the physical to the abstract. Of course at the bottom are our physiological needs like food, water, shelter, garbage like that. Next, is our need for safety. Safety contributes mostly to psychological need to know that we don't always have to be at a constant state of stimulation. Safety is 100% key to happiness and having a good time. Give a stranger a gun and your address and tell me how easy it is to relax. Anyway, the next level gets more abstract and even more interesting: friendship, family, and intimacy. We start to realize how tiny our lives are compared to everyone else's (not that our lives are smaller, just about the same relatively small size) (I'll also address death in a later post), and we start to need to associate and cement our existence. I don't know why the need to belong tends to override security. Maybe if you knew the stranger with the gun would bring cookies and your favorite movie, you would even try to make a new friend (see Stockholm syndrome). If this need for belonging is unmet or deficient in some way, it can lead to depression, social anxiety (another thing I'll address), and a general loneliness. But it's funny how occasionally being deficient in belonging can lead to these bouts of melancholy. We clearly rely heavily on the simple presence of others that happiness seems impossible without it, or at the very least unimaginable. I'll come back to this.

Continuing up the hierarchy, we have esteem. Esteem is another funny one because it's one thing to have people around, it's another thing to be accepted and respected by them. Honestly, if I was to critique Maslow, I would lump these elements of people-needing in with the previous level. But what deserves it's own level for sure is the notion that we need to achieve. This is HUGE. Nietzsche among others have written incredibly interesting works on the human need to achieve. Why do we do it? Maslow says that it's for two reasons. For us and for others. I say it's totally for us. On the surface, we care what people think. Performing makes me happy. Making people laugh makes me happy. But deep down, I just want to know I'm good at something. I want to know that my life has a purpose that transcends my frail body. I want to know that my capacity for reason and judgement enables me to do something worthwhile, that will stick out. Many existentialists talk about achievement as a way to secure immortality in a universe where ethereal immortality doesn't exist. Whether or not it does is a different discussion, but the need for money, fame, notoriety, and fans could easily be said to be a facade that says, "Hey world, look at me! I'm important!" But I think that it's also equally true that it's just as much of a way of saying, "Hey self, look at me! I'm important... I'm important... I'm good at something... I'm important."

So these things that make us happy, performing, being well-known in our field, having a ton of friends... is it just a way of dealing with our own mortality? It's possible that it's just a way to stave of the constant looming of that feeling of crippling despair that comes with being insignificant. This leads directly into the last level of the hierarchy... self-actualization. Knowing that you can live up to your greatest potential. Though I think I diverge from Maslow with this one because I think that most of the criteria he has for self-actualization are arbitrary things measured by society like morality, efficacy, rationality... You know, I actually only subscribe to Maslow in theory. I acknowledge the line between each level but I don't think I agree with the conceptual format. Maybe it's more like a square with 4 sections and each bears on the other a little. I don't know. I'll have to work that one out later.

The point is, we need to feel happy. We need it and most of us can't explain why we just feel this overwhelming desire to be happy. We know what makes us happy but I don't think any of us know why. And it's funny how fleeting the things that make us happy truly are, especially when viewed from the lens of when we aren't doing those things. A good friend once tried to tell me that wisdom is being able to point out the moments that are bad and getting through them until the next time when it's not so bad. But it's funny that we're just constantly running away from the bad moments in life and chasing after the good. Why does the good in life have to always be something that we chase? Why can't the good just be something that is?

I posted a status earlier today that might have been a little depressing and if it set off suicide alarms, I apologize. I'm fine, really. The point of the status was just that I don't know anyone who is truly happy all the time, whose life is the way they dreamed, and whose life just constantly delivers happiness at all times. Yeah of course you know happiness by knowing sadness... but again, why does happiness have to be something elusive? Is the state of nature completely devoid of happiness? And what if you were the last person on earth? You wake up tomorrow and no one is around. What does happiness mean when there's no one around to experience it with you? Can you truly be happy and self-actualize if there's no one to have standards by which to measure your achievements?

Listening to my music makes me happy. When my headphones are in, it's just me and the music. [It's funny because when I play my music for others, I always get the itching feeling that no one likes it as much as I do...] But why does that make me happy? Let's look at it in the context that we just explored. How can liking music relate to others....? Well I know other people like music and I know that if certain music is pleasing to me, it must be pleasing to others, right? Not always the case... but it's plausible. Maybe I just appreciate my own capacity to appreciate music, and that makes me think that I would be a good judge of music in a social situation in which that's called for? Who knows.

Think about what makes you happy. Always do that. Never, ever, ever stop doing what makes you happy. If happiness is something we have to chase, lock it in a cage and never let it go, keeping it by you at all times. If happiness lies in something as fleeting as the presence of certain people, keep them around you. If happiness goes away when certain people are around, keep them away from you. If happiness is just a thin tissue cast over what would otherwise be a pit of boiling despair, we might as well enjoy it when it's around. Melancholy will happen when some of that despair leaks onto the tissue, but maybe it's something we should embrace so we can know the true nature of our psyche.

And I'll try to make good on my promises to talk about death and social anxiety. But don't let me do it in the same post, that's not a great idea.

UPDATE 1 6/13: Stupid me... I didn't follow this whole conversation out to the next logical step after the conclusion. What I was really itching to say, and what probably sparked this entire post is that happiness seems to live and die with other people. How do you go from happy to sad? When your friends go home for the night? When you have to go home because you have work in the morning? Obviously everyone else's role in this little void isn't born of malice, but it seems that happiness declines exponentially with consciousness after a good time. Expressed mathematically is something like residual happiness = event happiness - consciousness^x where "residual happiness" is how happy you are after something fun like a sweet party. That's kind of a digression though and really isn't that important.

It is definitely interesting to think of memories as bricks--specific and defined pieces of an overall structure. Memories make up you who you are. They mold our retrospective perspectives on the past. They are the only proof of yesterday and the reason we induce that tomorrow will happen. But they have specific beginnings and endings. Sure, they can be linked together by other less well-defined memories, but the strongest memories have well defined edges and sizes and brightness and construct the largest parts of our overall memory structure. I guess the only difference between memories and actual bricks is that bricks don't really fade away or are as much subject to psychological influence as memories.

Yet another digression... Well, I've already kind of talked about how people can have an active influence on happiness. If they don't love you or express disappointment in you, your happiness is negatively influenced. If someone isn't who you thought they were or you don't have the relationship that you thought you did or could have, there's a significant and profound influence on how you feel. The need for acceptance can cause you to change your entire life, do things you don't like, and engage in poisonous relationships. It's quite interesting. Maybe I'm repeating myself... I just wanted to make sure these observations were on the record and quite clear.

UPDATE 2: Sadness is a full body and mind oppression. You feel it smother you from head to toe and it leaves you helpless and immobile--all you can think about is the pain. Melancholy is a splinter. It will sit under the surface and fester until it starts to hurt. But it doesn't hurt too bad. In fact, you're still able to carry about your day but the pain is still going to be a bother. You can remove it, but it's going to hurt to deal with. It's a tiny pain, but it's pain. It's a quick spasm of pain. But it's pain.

EDIT: Just for clarification, my interest in death and depression is purely academic in my pursuit to understand the human condition. Jeez...

End of Semester, the year 2010, and life as we know it.

So... you would think that it wouldn't be too terribly difficult to just sign in a drop a few quick thoughts onto this thing--what with all the free time I have. But alas... unlike the moderately well-thought-out philosophy-based posts I seem to type up every now and then, these improvised at-this-point-in-my-life posts are much more time and effort consuming. At least, that's what I tell myself.

That said, I'm obviously a little behind on things. The Fall 2010 semester ended, for me, on December 20th and the year 2010 ended for me and everyone else on December 31st. It's not the 2nd of January and one might ask, "Dylan, what exactly are your thoughts on things?" Well, to be fair, I don't think anyone would ask my thoughts on those things. But isn't that what this is for?

Anyway, the Fall 2010 semester for me had been quite possibly the best semester ever, as far as semesters have gone. I've tried my hardest to step out of my shell and talk and hang out with people instead of just staying in my room all the time (as I had done in the past). Overall, it's been a successful endeavor. Turns out that the best way to have new experiences and opportunities is to go out and seek them. Whodathunkit? So yeah. Uhh... but definitely good.

Of course, there was downs to go along with the ups but i think that really just puts in perspective. I know there are things that I hope for for 2011 and things that I want for 2012 but we'll just have to take it a day at a time. I'm very much looking forward to May but not because I'll have to be working/finishing my Junior year.

I think I started this with the intention of having something really long, thought out, and thought-provoking. It's just not turning out that way and I'm feeling kinda lazy (I told you it was energy-consuming)... so... Happy Belated New Year. May all your wishes come true... or whatever.