Re: Martin Fowler and the meaning of life

[Sethomas]

I posted a very similar thread to this probably about a year ago when I discovered Camus, but times change and so have I. I want to hear your thoughts.

Fartin made a comment about how futile it is to just think too goddamn much, as I'm wont to do. I've been at every corner of the existential spectrum, from blind acceptance of life's value in se et per se to crumbling in self-loathing for my having yet to end my one of billions of pointless lives in light of the fact that all life is pointless. When I dangle in the middle, I've often talked to perennial residents of each part of that spectrum. I ask the one "why keep going?" and the other "what the fuck is wrong with you?"

I think that the question is only really substantive if one doesn't consider the possibility of an afterlife. Right now I believe in a positive afterlife for those who earn it, although I make no claim to understanding its means. As for hell, I think that oblivion is punishment enough. Augustine defined evil as the privation of good, and I think that it's enough for evil souls enough to exist only long enough to highlight the good of others rather than necessitating an infinite expanse of time in excruciating physical pain.

That was a tangent, but what I was saying is that there's a certain integrity to living life as we do without expect of reward or fear of punishment. Or, alternately, the fear of perdition versus the reward of paradise should cancel each other out to require a fundamental internal reason for continuing in life. In the Book of Psalms heaven was promised as a balance for "this vale of tears"; the back of my book proposes my theory as a justification for "the stochastic fumbling of being and nothingness." But to assume nothing to existence but a lachrymose jumble of space and particles, why bother?

Kurt Vonnegut answered this question by saying that it was curiosity that put him through all these years. Despite Emerson's warning that imitation is suicide, I tend to fall in this line. If life is all we have, I may as well see what all I can get from it. I loathe philosophically-grounded egoism, but that is in fact the logical extension of nihilism. I would love to live for others, but I realize the irrationality of that. It's of little point to avoid hurting others with your departure if their equally pointless lives will end in a geological microsecond, isn't it?

So, I write this in a good time in my life when I have a wonderful significant other, a functional mental chemistry, and what's probably an irrational optimism for my own future. So, I figure, why not see what's next?

In that thread, what works for you guys?