about existential questions // part2 // UNFINISHED //

I chose to terminate this article here because there’s no point in writing further about this matter. Everyone has a personal view on this. I have solved mine. If you’re interested in talking about this, give me a call, we’ll talk about it.

—

So, we’ve seen in part1 that meaning is forced on to people by society. Success is a good example. Money another one. But it always kind of leave us empty. We’re never sure if it’s real, we’re never sure if it makes some sense. I think a lot of people around me are having this crisis because they believed that after having a degree from a famous school, the issue of meaning would be solved – “I’m an architect from the best school in the world” – yeah, but no. Nothing is solved. It’s worse. They day you go get your little certificate, it’s all cool, you’re all happy. Then next day, same old you. It’s worse because now, not only it is meaningless but it was supposed to give you meaning. What now? People want to know… what they are supposed to do.

The following is an attempt to solve the question. “What is the meaning of all this?” – we’ve seen some ready made answers in part 1. Quite okay, we can all have the little house with white fences and a dog. There’s nothing wrong with it. We can actually function okay on those. But the issue is that it doesn’t have any flexibility nor personality. So, if you want meaning, you have to be Christian? … or a consumer? What a pile of shit, I think that especially smart people need meaning because they don’t get caught into all this shit talk and peer pressure. The question remains… within the chaos, where’s the meaning? Where do we find it? And if we find meaning, does it mean we have to do it repeatedly like a robot until the day we die? Like “This is my mission on earth! I’m going to do this!!”. It sounds kind of stiff.

this is it. 42.

Before we proceed, I’d like to admit that this is not an easy subject. And it is probably the hardest article I’ve written to date. I have countless of talks over this issue and I’ve used it to refine. It is more of an attempt to clarify what is important rather than being philosophically/intellectually correct. We can also see it as my personal advice, if you will.

So, let’s… I’d like to take a little flexibility in the thinking and diverge the question in a less intellectual path. It’s a more an emotional pathway.

–

So here goes… meaning of life.

If we try and remember our childhood memory. Some best of it… like a birthday party or the first time we kissed our first girlfriend/boyfriend. Where was the meaning? Kind of nowhere. I remember when I was playing football in the backyard of my primary school, yelling (already) obscene stuffs, life didn’t require a meaning. It was awesome. Period. In fact, it was so awesome that we seemed crazy — “in the zone” — like wild animals, you know. When you’re in that state, you need no meaning, you make meaning. You don’t search for it… The search for meaning only appears in times when we are miserable. “What am I doing?” is the typical question that you’d ask if you didn’t enjoy your experience. So we can assume that meaning is not entirely correlated to “what are you doing?” but rather “how are you feeling about what you’re doing?”. I believe that as long as the answer to the second question is “great” … we don’t need the answer to the first one.

Then let’s combine that emotional path with a drier philosophy: existentialism… in which, we postulate that: “the meaning of a life is defined by the sum of the actions we take. In which, we’re entirely responsible for every choices and actions we make. Man is ultimately free and responsible for his/her own freedom – the ones that deny it are called cowards or fuckers” (reinterpreted from existentialism is a humanism by Sartre). It goes further saying that there is no moral and we’re always in the anxiety of making meaning. This is helpful because it breaks every single one of the predefined pathways that we talked about in part1 and replaces it with freedom and responsibility. It saves us from becoming little sheeps.

So, if we combine those two things … the emotions and the philosophy, I’d like to pose one very simple hypothesis.

–

We’re ultimately free to shape meaning. The meaning that we have is the sum of our actions. (philosophy)

When we’re miserable, everything is meaningless, so we search for a meaning. Life doesn’t require meaning when we’re fulfilled. In fact, everything is meaningful then. (emotion)

So meaning is relative to freedom and fulfilment.

–

It sounds too simple… but, the answer I came to is: to find meaning, you need to get rid of it. After all, having a meaning is a little bit stiff…  So the goal is to be in this eternally “absurd” state while maintaining “happiness”… or rather durable fulfilment. When we’re not fulfilled, the world shifts into chaos. When we are fulfilled, the world is meaningful again. So it looks like this:

This little “equation” is the child of the combination of rationalisation and emotion, which I think it is a quite wonderful combination. Since I always like to think of humans as “hyper emotional but slightly rational” beings. So there are two components of this equation, freedom and fulfilment. Sounds great… but a bit vague. Let’s look at them individually. To be logical, let’s start with the second.

–

The durable fulfilment

I’m taking a toddler’s point of view on this in order to be precise. There’s several emotional and physical state and we’d like to argue, for the sake of individuality that, emotions are subjective. But it’s rather true that emotions have a universal degree of good and bad. With empathy, we can relate to something bad or good happening to our fellow humans. So we cry together and cheer together. Good and bad are subjective but their degrees are universal. The subject of my bad thing might be a good thing to you, but the degree of my bad thing is the same as the bad thing to you. So, if you will, we react with the same emotional degrees to different subjects.

So if fulfilment have degrees ranging from good to bad, it means that there are extremes. Extreme bad and extreme good. Those we can totally agree on and thus define a rule. The definition of the worst ever would be physical or psychological inexistence. As in physical and mental death. The definition of the best ever is physical and psychological bliss. A kind of nirvana, trance or godlike presence of some sort. So we have a relative scale. Almost simplistic.

The graph doesn’t say anything striking. But if we ask the question “what do you chose?”, then it start to be quite useful.

—-

about existential questions // part1

Hi. I want to tell you about a really odd question that bothers some of us… and that most of us rather not think about. It’s never really the right time to write about it because you always discover something new about it. I arrived at the junction of my life, having finished the architectural education where I ask myself the question “okay, what now?”. People around me are all kind of having the crisis of “what the fuck now?” – it’s sometime funny to watch, sometimes painful and most of the time repetitive.

It’s kind of the question “why am I here?” – simple, yet tricky.

The first time I realised this fully, I was in the observatory in Geneva. We were supposed to observe a mini eclipse of jupiter by its satellite, Io. The moment came, it was… really not impressive and boring. Just a small dot on a ball. But the biggest realisation is this: the next time this happens, it will be in 250 years. You, me, all of the people in the room will be dead by then. Me being alive in 250 years in the observatory is really not important because the eclipse of jupiter is boring as hell to look at. But ultimately, it strike me: the universe doesn’t care. The realisation of my place within this gigantic scale made me panic… and at 14 year old, I kind of had my first existential crisis. What now? I am insignificant – what is the meaning of all this? What is the meaning of me?

beautiful, isn’t it?

As adults, to exist, we have a concept called “responsibility” – which is a very stupid concept. In which, external pressure makes you do stuffs. “Oh, but you know, I have no time. I have responsibilities” – “Oh, I’m so busy because of this and that…” – “he/she’s making me do this/that” — Really? For real? If you think about it, as you are absolutely insignificant in this universe, nobody or nothing is making you do anything. Maybe your biology asks you to survive… not even that. You know those guys who overdose, then die, then go on Facebook for a day or two, then are forgotten? Well, that’s it. The universe doesn’t give a shit. You are totally free to live. Those who say the contrary are “cowards” (this is the philosophical definition.. not my personal opinion). But we all have to agree that to live is sometimes soooo damn frightening.

With the realisation of this freedom comes the responsibility to ask “as I am free, what do I do?” – “what is right? what is wrong?”. These questioning, if done for a long period, leads to the destruction of all belief systems. Which leads the realisation that we are alone in our decisions. Which leads to an existential anxiety. “Who am I, how do I do what I’m supposed to do?”. As existential philosophy states “man is always in the anxiety of deciding”.

maybe… to be is to do “do be do be do”… I’m not quite sure

Most people avoid these questions because it’s painful and really complicated…

Really fucking complicated in fact. So we find kind of ready made answers by society. Which function okay… but not really satisfying. Here are the main ones.

Find a God

This one is pretty easy.  I think most humans believe in some form of God. So, you are alone, you freak out, you find some dude who is the symbol of the universal and omnipotence, you tell yourself that he loves you. That’s it, you’re at peace… but not really because your neighbour kind of believe in a different dude or worse, dude”s”. Then you throw a tantrum, wage war because your existence is menaced — crusade and all the jazz. Bombing buildings and nasty stuffs. Inquisition… frankly, not cool. So God, as it is by the main religions, not cool. But we all pretty much know that.

Buy stuffs

This is what we’re living in right now. Consumerism is comforting. It really is. You freak out, you buy a new thing, it distracts you. Rinse and repeat. Then you’re addicted to your stuffs, you become dependent, you become a slave of your work because you have to pay your… uh “buy now, pay later cut in 12 months” bill. Then you freak out, you buy… it’s kind of ironic isn’t it? The worst of this is that some people become so addicted that they’re kind of caught in a Stockholm Syndrom “oh, man, I get paid really well, I love my job, I can pay my self made debt” – What the fuck, man. What the fuck. Put “make war, politics” etc… in this category. Waging war is basically going on a violent shopping spree.

Make kids

This one is a little bit more complicated since it involve two people. But, you know, a lot did it. It kind of buys you time and reassures you a bit. Because it is a fraction of you that is going to survive a little bit further in time and the little kid makes a good company. This is why a lot of parents “live for their kids” — because, secretly, they are too afraid to live for themselves. Also, “live for your kids” – puts all of your own pressure on the kid. He’s like.. having double pressure – “succeed better than I did – be happier than I am”. Yeah right. It only continues the question one cycle further plus parent – child resentment. Really too complicated for my taste. Just, damn it, don’t make kids to reassure yourself, the poor thing hasn’t asked to be here and it already has trouble to solve. Take a pet or a stuffed animal.

put a baby, or a doctor, because it makes it more convincing

Do philosophy or science

The most boring of all… the power of logic. If we think hard and analyse hard enough, we will make it clear. Science most of the time only answer the “how” of things… it rarely answer the meaning side of things because it is not scientific to interpret. As in “how did the big bang happen” not “why did the big bang happen” or “what is the meaning of the big bang?”. This is when philosophy comes in. It is the science of meaning… but, frankly, philosophy is kind of evolved social discussion with no truth what so ever. You can bend and break philosophy how you want… sometimes it even seems like it’s a personal opinion thing. Further more, philosophers have a tendency to ask more questions than to reply to them. After reading “Existentialism as a humanism” by Sartre, you freak out even more. “Human is ultimately in the anxiety of eternally choosing” – yay… like that helped.

Make art

If there’s no meaning, then make meaning! Making art is somehow a way to understand our world. A way to look and interpret it, then a way to make meaning out of the chaos. When you’re on the other side of creativity, which is so à-la-mode now, everybody is a designer of some sort – it’s pretty cool. But it’s also pretty clear : nobody knows what he’s doing and we all feel like impostors. Trust me, I “work” in a “creative” environment. The term being a “creative” makes everybody cringe because nobody knows what he/she is doing. And we’re all afraid of being busted as fraud. Just go to an architectural “creative” meeting and you’ll see : we don’t have any clue. My teacher, D. Dietz, used to say, as comment “maybe, yeh, but, no” – seriously. So… the question is how can we trust meaning produced by art? The answer is we can’t. That’s why it’s temporal and subjective. It is necessary but ultimately unreliable.

 “what’s the meaning of this?” – “go home, Jackson, you’re drunk”

….

So we can see that the ready made answers are kind of okay, but they’re not quite there yet… but, here, I take a break, because I know from experience that beyond 1000 words, people get bored. So we can move on to the next part… how do we then solve this issue in an individual and community level? Jump to part2.