A long while ago, I proclaimed I would marry an American woman. Strange but true, and possibly a side effect of watching too much exported American TV as a kid. Now, in the end, I ended up meeting the perfect woman for me, who just happened to be American. In the same period of youthful TV addiction, when I thought Frazier was the be all,end all of comedy (in retrospect possibly due to its programming time and consistency and the fact that wherever you went in the 1990s it was on, kind of like the A-team in German)
So this is a long and winding way of saying that I was also hooked on the idea from an early age, that one day I would lie on a therapist’s couch, probably an American one. Hopefully not a radio show therapist, but in the end, I did take a therapist. More chair than couch, but rather like a self-indulgent blog, a place where I can talk and talk and talk all about me.
One thing that unfolded today, in the due passing of time, was that I feel that life is ultimately pointless, and acknowledge that I’m going to die. Most people probably accept the latter (and try to ignore it), but may have different opinions about the former. Life being essentially just a bit of time of unimaginable insignificance in any external grand scheme of things can sometimes be a little off-putting. Then again, the flip side of a lifetime being the speck of dust in the margin of a long tome in a vast library that is going to be sooner or later set on fire, is that there is a huge lack of insignificance from the perspective of the life itself. I’m sure there’s some twisted anthropic principle (TAP) that says that life is basically awesome as there’s this whole observable universe available to you by virtue of you being born, that it would be best to take advantage of.
And so the uplifting part of life being essentially pointless (We apologize for the inconvenience) is that you can really do whatever you want to with it. There are many things on my list, and if Burning Man 2005 taught me anything, it was the first thing we need is a list. (The second was some sitting, if I recall). One thing I think, is to continue making progress towards driving a car around a track faster and faster. What could be more pointless? I don’t plan on spending my kids’ inheritance on a supercharger just yet, but I’m tired of having to justify to myself why I should want to do such a thing – a wet fart in the blustery wind of 6 billion people trying to drink fresh water. I’m sure on the forums (alright then, fora), people would simply sum up the entire last 478 words with: because faster, but the internet doesn’t fill itself up with meandering thought, even if all of my words are second hand.
So that sort of puts me somewhere between will to [horse] power (Adler), will to pleasure (Freud) and will to meaning (Frankl). “How is driving a car ever faster in a futile race against the grim reaper a search for meaning?” I hear from the peanut gallery. Frankl talked about three approaches to discovering meaning:
- experiential values (doing something, such as driving a car or feeling love)
- creative values (again, doing something – such as driving fast, or building a car to drive fast)
- attitudinal values (I interpret this as having a new attitude to something, such as racing around a track with a normally aspirated engine)
So there is an opportunity to discover meaning, simply by turning up, doing something (or not), feeling something (or not) or even just fostering a way of thinking about something. And what better than a cheap Miata to tune up and add new bits too to get me closer to meaning? Step 1: learn to drive Miata. Step 2: learn to drive turbo Miata. Step 3: get a Mitsubishi Evo and ignore everything everyone says about cars with wings.
In other news, Wikipedia needs your money to carry on being awesome. Send it some. It will help you in your quest for meaning in the existential vacuum of the internet reader.