Photo by Julián on Unsplash
It’s a common experience to sometime feel like what we do is absurd or meaningless. For some people this is an occasional feeling, for others it’s a more continual condition.
I used to feel like that a lot.
I used to drive around aimlessly at night, and I would look at every house and think : Are they happy? Are they a loving family or a quarreling family? Are they healthy? What are their dreams? Are they in debt? Do they work for companies I never even heard about? Do they eat supper with the tv on?
Just a bunch of dumb questions. There is just.. so many people out there. I felt like I was insignificant, drowning in a sea of people, all trying to live their own insignificant lives.
I felt absurdity. A kind of “what’s the point?”, a disconnection with meaning.
I read a philosophical article called “The Absurd” (1971) by Thomas Nagel, a famous American philosopher, and it really stuck with me.
It goes somewhat like this :
When you ask people who feels that life is absurd “why?”, they say things like :
Nothing I do will matter in a million years.
We are a tiny speck in the infinite vastness of the universe.
Our lives last only an instant on a cosmic scale.
We are all going to die anyway.
He then made a convincing case against those.. I won’t go over the entire thing but briefly:
If what we do does not matter in a million years, symmetrically, nothing that happens in a million years matters now.
Also, we don’t know what will or will not matter in the future.
Imagine now, that you were the size of the universe. Would that make your life any less absurd?
To me, that’s a very comical thought experiment. I imagine myself floating in the void, even universe-sized, I feel like my life would be more absurd because.. I wouldn’t be able to meaningfully interact with what I care about. It would be cosmically absurd. It would push absurdity to the highest degree.
Same thing goes for immortality. Don’t get me wrong, I think it would be awesome for a while.. But does it really make life any less absurd? In some ways, if life feels absurd now, it could very well become infinitely absurd. It’s unclear by what mechanism it would become meaningful.
In the article, Nagel goes into a more detailed refutation, but basically the conclusion is that the arguments given to explain why life is absurd are all incomplete.
Life does feel absurd sometimes, but it’s not just because of time or space or mortality, it’s about something else.
But what?
To answer that, Nagel takes a little detour to explore the feeling of absurdity in ordinary, everyday life. For example:
John : Oh no, I need to tell Sarah I love her before she boards her plane! I need to call her now before it’s too late!
Phone : *ring* *ring* *click* Hello this is Sarah
John : *rush to speak* Sarah, listen to me, I love you! Please don’t take that plane! I…
Phone : … I’m unavailable to take your call right now, please leave a message. *BEEP*
The absurdity here comes from the clash of two perspectives. In this case John perspective ; he thinks he’s having a deeply meaningful revelatory life changing moment with Sarah.. and the cold impersonal perspective of the pre-recorded message.
The gap between aspiration and reality is just too big, it makes all the energy, all the emotions, feel completely unjustified, unnecessary, meaningless.
More generally, the absurdity of life itself comes from a similar mechanism :
Firstly, human life is full of effort, emotions, investments, plans, success, and failure. We cannot stop caring about our lives. Even when we try to ignore it, hunger, anxiety, love and ambition pull us back in.
There is no escaping the seriousness with which we live our lives.
- Which profession should I pursue?
- Who should I marry?
- Should I have children?
- Should I join the tennis club?
- Should I travel to Japan?
- What’s for dinner?!?
They spend enormous quantities of energy, risk, and calculation on the details. Think of how an ordinary individual sweats over his appearance, his health, his sex life, his emotional honesty, his social utility, his self-knowledge,the quality of his ties with family, colleagues, and friends, how well he does his job, whether he understands the world and what is going on in it.
Leading a human life is a full-time occupation, to which everyone devotes decades of intense concern. This fact is so obvious that it is hard to find it extraordinary and important. Each of us lives his own life-lives with himself twenty-four hours a day. What else is he supposed to do - live someone else’s life? - Thomas Nagel
Secondly, there’s another perspective that is always available to us :
sub specie aeternitatis, Latin for under the aspect of eternity
This is the “objective” perspective, the external viewpoint.
That’s what science teach us about the world, that the universe is 13 billion years old, that humans aren’t special beings, we are mammals evolved from great apes. That God probably doesn’t exists. That we don’t know.. a lot.
With that viewpoint, we can zoom out so far that Earth isn’t even relevant anymore.
And this is where the collision happens: when our serious, subjective first-person experience clashes with our objective third-person point of view.
We step back to find that the whole system of justification and criticism, which controls our choices and supports our claims to rationality, rests on responses and habits that we never question, that we should not know how to defend without circularity, and to which we shall continue to adhere even after they are called into question.
The things we do or want without reasons, and without requiring reasons - the things that define what is a reason for us and what is not - are the starting points of our skepticism.
We see ourselves from outside, and all the contingency and specificity of our aims and pursuits become clear.
Yet when we take this view and recognize what we do as arbitrary,it does not disengage us from life, and there lies our absurdity : not in the fact that such an external view can be taken of us, but in the fact that we ourselves can take it, without ceasing to be the persons whose ultimate concerns are so coolly regarded. - Thomas Nagel
To circle all the way to the start, the reasons people give to explain why their life feels absurd are not causes, but rather symptoms. They are the symptoms of someone who took that “back step” and adopted a broader perspective.
They are describing half of the process.
It’s also because they actually care so much about their life that they can feel that absurdity.
That feels a bit counterintuitive, but the people who are apathetic because of the absurdity of life are the very people who care the most about their lives then.
That’s ultimately Nagel’s answer ; to care a little less, to live ironically, because once we truly appreciate the cosmic unimportance of the situation, then it doesn’t matter either that our lives are absurd.
We go on seriously caring, but without self-deception that it’s not arbitrary.
One other thing that grabs me when reading this is the psychological aspect.
When asked, “Why is your life meaningless?” we think we are rational, and we say, “I’m just an insignificant cog in a giant machine.”
That’s not the real reason why, though.
The real reason is that we felt the absurdity. A clash of perspectives happened.
We often fail to consider that feelings often (nearly always) precede logic and rationality.
That’s something I want to write more about in the future.
To me, those thought experiments really drive home that what matters to me is other people. I’m a social being. Everything I consider meaningful that I do is related to other people.
It makes me think about the people I want to have around, the people I want to love and be loved by. I don’t want to live forever if it means I’m alone.
That feels.. real and meaningful to me.
It would be easy to push back here and bring into suspicion the reasons why I feel that way, for example, by saying that I just evolved into caring about those things. This is the sub specie aeternitatis view again. The objective view from the outside.
It’s so easy to fall back into it.
Maybe that’s enough for today.
But no one will be left here to remember us
When the fires come