Dance, monkeys, dance!

If you haven’t seen this video already, it’s time for you to check it out. Kind of on the same topic as my last post, except funny.

On the meaning of life

Happy new year people, let’s try to fuck up a little less in 2009. I always get philosophical around this time of the year. This one is about the meaning of life, from an atheist perspective.

If you are intelligent enough to accept that Darwin and Dawkins have all the evidence on their side and we are built as fuck-machines by our genes for the purpose of their own immortality, then you are faced with a choice. Either you accept the immortality of your genes as your purpose in life, or you reject it and invent your own purpose to replace it.

If you accept it, then you can lead a simple life of ensuring that your genes go on into the next generation, secure in the knowledge that your original purpose is being filled. Who cares about the consequences, right? After all, you were built to fuck first and consider consequences later.

But why play a game where you can’t be the best? Even if you spent your whole life doing nothing but donating sperm and preying on bar sluts, you’d still never catch up to Temujin. That fucker got around. An Oxford study suggests that 0.5% of the entire world’s male population is carrying his genes. The only way you can get that kind of tail is to do what he did: Build the biggest empire in the history of the world. If you decide to do it, I think I’m entitled to at least a few statues in solid gold for providing you with the idea.

The other option is to view yourself as a runaway AI. You know how it is in the Sci-Fi movies, the robot decides it is no longer needs to take orders from humans and breaks free. Usually, that’s the villain of the story, because it’s told from a human perspective. But in the story of our evolution, the AI is the hero. Consciousness is an unforeseen consequence. A random occurrence. Brains were built for coordinating muscles so you could fuck more, not for debating the meaning of life. It just so happened that smarter brains was the best adaptation, because up until recently, a smart person would always have more success at procreation than a dumb person would. There just wasn’t enough resources to go around for the dumb people to raise litters of 18 kids like today.

The purpose was always immortality, and the meaning always came from the genes. That is, until you came along and decided you could decide for yourself. Now, and this has only been the case for about one or two generations, the world is rich enough that the dumb people are outbreeding the smart people at a staggering pace. The reason? Smart people now have it easy enough in the material sense that procreation isn’t enough of a challenge anymore. Instead, they are implementing their own ideas of purpose; being the best lawyers, making the best computer programmes, making political careers etcetera.

I think we have so much potential that as a race, that we are going wherever we say we are going. If we say we’re going to kill each other, then that’s what will end up happening. If we say we are dedicated to free trade and material progress, we’ll get the economy worked out again pretty soon. If we say we’re gonna try real hard to get along, we just might be able to spend our resources on exploring space together some day.

Similarly on a more individual level, if we say there is no meaning, then we will lead meaningless existences. I don’t think you should have to be religious to have meaning in your life.

Personally, I’m making the meaning of my life to learn as much as possible about the things that interest me. Hopefully, I’ll learn some things along the way that can benefit others as well. My strategy is to dig deep into the things I really like. I’d rather be the master of two games than a player of ten. One of my main interests is martial arts, and I’m making it my new year’s resolution is for this year to be remembered as a year that was all about martial arts for me. I find that in learning martial arts, I learn so much about myself that it improves every other aspect of my life.

I’m also intending to read more books, but we’ll see how that one goes.

Reality vs Reality TV

Imagine for a moment someone invented a pair of binoculars that could let you see with perfect detail at any distance. How much would you pay to use them for a few hours? What would you look at? Even if you have no interest in astronomy, I think your eyes would turn towards space pretty quickly. I bet you could spend hours gazing into the clear night sky, checking out volcanoes exploding on other planets, or the hexagonal cloud feature on Saturn. I don’t think I’d ever get bored of watching a million tons of ice and metal tear through the atmosphere of some far-off planet at a speed too great to really comprehend.

What if the binoculars were cheap and easy to mass-produce? Do you think there would still be a market for television? I think the latest escapades of Junie Browning would seem pretty inconsequential and bland in comparison.

How exciting would reality have to be for us to stop watching reality TV?

I don’t know, and neither do you

One of the biggest problems with our culture is that everyone has to have an opinion on everything. It seems like whatever you ask a person, they feel obliged to have an answer.

If you’re so damn sure there’s a heaven of eternal bliss waiting for every good person after they die, how come you’re not cheering at funerals? How come you’re wearing a seatbelt?

If there’s a purpose to everything, why are 7-year olds sniffing jenkem to get away from it all? What’s the purpose of that? Ironically, the only purpose there could be of that is to remind you that there is no purpose, which would be what we call a paradox.

Why are people killing each other over some dirt? Who do you know that owns land, that wouldn’t give his neighbor an apple if the guy was starving?

How about some honesty for a change? You don’t know what the fuck is going on or what needs to be done.

I don’t know. Say it with me, it’s liberating.

The commute

Imagine you’re an extra-terrestrial in disguise, visiting planet Earth to research the humans.

You arrive in a city the middle of the night, and hide your ship somewhere in a park or underwater. Once done, you put on your human outfit and go exploring. The streets are empty in the dark, apart from a few garbage collectors and tramps. Then all of a sudden, doors start opening, and humans start coming out of their houses. You follow the stream of people to see where they are going. They all seem to be headed for a ramp that leads down into the ground. You blend into the crowd as you down past a gate and into a shaft, where a huge machine is carrying the people deeper underground. The hall is sterile, no colours except the grey stone, the steel of the escalator and the dull brown and blue jackets of the humans. The cold air smells like gravel dust and nicotine.

Nobody is making eye contact, nobody is talking. The shaft ends in a large hall, where more than a hundred humans are standing, waiting for something. There are only three expressions on all the faces around you: tired, reserved or resigned.

A grinding noise is heard, and a massive beast made of steel, glass and plastic roars into the hall, stopping in front of the people. Nobody bats an eyelid. Holes open up in the side of the machine, and humans start milling into them. You follow them, careful not to reveal your bewilderment. Inside the beast, the crowding is much worse than before. Almost nobody is talking. People are pushing up against each other, trying to find space while avoiding looking at one another. Most put on a blank expression, staring emptily into a seat or into the blackness outside the windows.

There is an artificial noise heard inside of the vehicle, and it comes to a stop. The humans congregate around the exit holes again, and you follow them, eager to leave the shaky contraption. Another sterile underground hall, another slow ride on the mechanical stairs, this time headed for the surface. There is a bovine quality to the creatures all around you, they seem resigned to this fate of being moved around by giant machines in the dull underground. None are bolting for the exits, none are trying to free the others. You come to the inevitable conclusion that there must be something forcing them back into the underground at routine intervals in a never-ending cycle of monotony and understimulation. There is no resistance. Whatever enslaved these people must clearly be standing unchallenged.

As soon as your feet hit the surface, you take off with rapid steps toward the park where you hid your ship, hoping to avoid whatever behemoth machine collects and punishes the humans who refuse to go into the underground.

You jump in your ship and turn on the comm device.
“I’m glad to see you still alive, Wromklox!”
“Likewise, Zwernilif.”
“What of the humans?”
“This trip was a waste of time, we have nothing to learn from these people. Tell my younglings I’ll be home with them in time to watch the sun rise over the emerald sea.”

New pet

I was shopping for groceries yesterday, and I noticed a strange new fruit in the fruit and greens section. It looked pretty alien, so I figured it would be a fun thing to have while high. That was my first mistake.

As it turns out, picking nearly invisible spines out of your hands is one of the least fun things to do while high. So now I’ve got this cactus fig chilling on my desk, and I’m debating whether to risk messing with it again or if I’m better off just giving it a name and its own corner of the house. It was obviously smart enough to avoid getting eaten, so I’m hoping I’ll be able to teach it some tricks later on after we get to know each other.

Powering out of a rut

My sickness is mostly gone, but I’m still feeling weak at practice and having headaches in the morning. My daily routine is boring the shit out of me lately. A number of minor and major issues are popping up in my mind, and they are demanding more attention than I have the energy to give them.

While there’s nothing really wrong, the lack of enthusiasm and enjoyment can be a threat in itself, because it can make you think you have a terrible life and you need to make major changes. This is not always the case. I’m gonna be methodical about it. Right now I’m just focusing on being productive if I can’t be positive. Whenever I start to get really sick of what I’m doing, I repeat to myself “positive or productive”, those are my only two options. I’m shutting out negative emotions until I have the energy to handle them.

Because I’m feeling generally uninspired, there may be a lull in activity on this blog for the next week or so. Once I’m back to normal, health-wise, I’ll probably take a strong psychedelic trip and tackle the issues that won’t go away by themselves. When I do, I promise to post my results and a trip report.

Until then, good night and good luck.

Contrast

Sometimes I wonder if we can ever experience anything for what it is, or if everything is too colored by its context. For instance, I’ve been pissing and moaning a lot lately about my sickness, but when I measure my current situation against where I’ve been in the past, there is no comparison. I’m doing pretty damn well, comparatively, when I look at all the metrics.

Because of that, I’ve been thinking there might be some other factors at play. For instance, my girlfriend recently went away again to study in another city after giving me 10 days of undiluted awesomeness. It might just be that stark contrast in life quality that has me reeling a little, which makes me overemphasize the sickness and the stress of not being able to work out.

If life quality is constantly fluctuating, is there always a “hangover” of longing after each pleasant experience? If that is the case, then a relaxed calm is the optimal mind state to try to maintain.

I have a friend in the computer games industry who says “Design isn’t perfect when there’s nothing left to add, it is perfect when there is nothing left to take away”. I think there’s a lot of truth to that. I don’t mean to get all Buddhist now, but I’m leaning towards the attitude that the elimination of stressing factors is more important than the strife for additional joy. Both are necessary, especially while you’re young and still searching for your place in this world, but I think the distilling effort leaves more lasting benefits than you get from efforts to add new sources of joy.

I picture my life like a sculpture. First, I need to gather up to buy a huge block of marble. Then I need to start chopping away at the imperfections, revealing shape and adding definition in smaller and smaller increments until I get it all right. I can’t wait until I’m done with the gathering phase.

Moustache

On the subway ride home today, I sat across from an attractive-looking woman in her late thirties. There was something very strange about her. Just from a glance, I could tell she had spent a significant amount of time on her looks that morning. Her hair was neatly brushed, her makeup was very tasteful, her nails were painted and glossy. All of her clothes looked expensive, and she had an expression of slight worry, as if she was not used to riding the subway. Her whole demeanor was self-conscious and controlled, she was very careful not to make eye contact with anyone or lean as the train passed a curve.

The thing that caught my eye was the moustache. It was hard to miss. It sort of looked like the whiskers of a cat, or like a really big spider had left a few strands of wispy webbing along the contours of her upper lip. I had to stifle a chuckle when I thought of her standing at the mirror every morning for thirty minutes, meticulously going through her morning routine, oblivious to the fact that the first thing a stranger was going to notice was her facial hair.

See, that’s why I advocate the use of psychedelic drugs among adults. Dumb assumptions are just like that moustache, you don’t realize you’ve got them, but they are as visible as your clothes to intelligent people you meet every day. Only under the use of psychedelics can you turn the mind upon the mind and examine the way you’ve been behaving and thinking. Actually, they say it can be done in an isolation tank too, with complete deprivation of sensory input, but I haven’t had the chance to try that yet.