The Existential Mood
"Had she been Queen of the Universe for a million years and witnessed glory after glory, what would it have mattered now that she had come to this?"
- Thom Jones,
"I Want to Live!"
"I Want to Live!"
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- Blue Stahli,
Throw Away
Throw Away
It occurs to me today that perhaps the proper antidote to the Existenial Outlook – i.e. the view, probably correct, for whatever correctness is worth, that life is a designless, purposeless, generally mostly painful grand cosmic joke – is to regard life instead as an opportunity. Specifically, a fantastic once-in-a-lifetime (once forever, for all time, actually) opportunity to do things that are either:
- Fun; or
- Useful
One thing this theory sheds a lot of light on is maybe why work is so problematical for me: I've always pretty much made my major career goal the maximization of the money / bullshit ratio, i.e. the most money I could get for the least bullshit I had to put up with. But if the work is neither fun nor useful (or is rarely fun or useful), then a maximized BS/$ ratio is not all that helpful. Bullshit is bad, and to be avoided; and money is necessary to live. But whereas money is necessary to life, it is deeply, wildly insufficient. Maximizing BS/$ is merely arranging to absorb the least possible pain while keeping body and soul together and racing ahead, just, of the Reaper (whom we might also call Entropy – yes, you too will one day be reduced to your constituent parts). (*)
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Incidentally, Brother Po says that there's going to be bullshit in every job – and the great trick is to have a job that's meaningful enough to you that the meaning enables you to weather whatever great rolling shitstorms come. I don't know. (*)
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Also incidentally, the best thing I've ever written on this topic (and you can delete the "on this topic" bit; and also, really, anyway, everything I write is on this topic one way or another) is this short story.
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