Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash
Time can go fast. Really it only goes slow when we are very much “living in the moment”. But even then, looking back, it seems to have gone fast.
I never understood this cliche: “Spend the day as if it is your last”. We don’t. We cannot. It’s not a good idea. We have to spend the days as if it’s not our last because it probably isn’t. I get the point of the suggestion, but it’s pretty fucking weak in my opinion.
What if we only lived for a single day? Not an infant mortality situation. Imagine the entire cycle of maturity and deterioration occurring in rapid sequence over the course of only 24 hours. Imagine you are trapped in this body, but your thoughts pass at the same familiar cadence. How would philosophy adapt in this world? Could we vindicate striving for the same things in such an abbreviated life span? Seems all you could do in such a short time is walk around seeing some things. I guess you would find a mate. You don’t want to miss that highlight of the day. What might you tell your visibly maturing kids in the short time you have to share? In this scenario, if you are born at midnight you’d be mature around 6 AM, and nearly out of school. You’d be pretty old by 6 PM. You might have kids a little after 8 AM, who hopefully move out by 1 PM or so. I guess the point of this thought experiment is that the scenario makes it harder to ignore reality and take things for granted.
Is longevity an excuse for living without purpose? Death often feels too distant to bother about. Pursuit. We do it because we are trained to. The society we live in encourages individual pursuit. Primitives don’t pursue in the same way. I guess they do, but the target is literal. Our target has simply been obscured. No one is wanting for food. So the focus shifts up the hierarchy of needs to status, and actually status is the problem for me. This seems to me to be a false pursuit. People say to find something you enjoy doing. I have found that in many things. Although, status is not totally meaningless; status is power and power is resources. Ultimately, it means resources for oneself and loved ones. But it may also mean the sacrifice of one’s soul. Losing touch with our humanity — getting lost in the pursuit of status or eventually believing oneself to be better than one’s fellow humans.
Here is a righteous and definite moral without two sides. Each person is no better, no worse than anyone else in terms of innate value and dignity. It’s a classicly Christian ethic. It applies to every gender, race, creed, and caste. It seems to follow that equalizing opportunity is a great cause.
Reasoning eventually requires some sense-based or emotional platform to start from. I find this fact fascinating to come to grips with. Probably because our age is so rationally oriented, we are led to believe in a foundation of rationality. But it’s not true.
As a human, I love my family and have innate desires. From there I can construct a decision tree regarding how to live. In my opinion, reasoning alone without humanity tends to suggest a meaningless existence.
There are many things I want that seem to sprout from me and not from rationality. I love my family. I care about my friends. I want to live near the ocean. I want privacy. I want variety. I want stability. I want fun. I want respect. I want freedom from compulsion. I need meaning. Does emotion provide some kind of meaning? Not really. It seems to me only belief generates meaning. Belief is an intellectual leap of faith typically based on some emotional and rational basis. I don’t know what I believe though. As a born skeptic, I’ve avoided rigid beliefs. Maybe my only belief has been that people tend to believe in things far too quickly. But maybe uncertainty is not so wise after all. Can you live a meaningful life without belief? Carpe Diem.
Originally published on Substack