Once you realize the cold, hard truth – that no one, and I mean, no one gives a shit about you, life gets so much easier. No more conflict. No more expectations being dashed. No more hurt feelings. No more trying to convince anybody of anything. Fuck it. Fuck them. Fuck it all. Then you just go about your life doing your thing totally free. Sure, you yourself care about others, which kind of puts the kibosh on this theory, but you just ignore that fact and keep on keeping on. Occasionally, you have a meaningful and even beautiful encounter with another, but you know that it must remain brief and that you must move on before expectations begin to develop, fucking up the whole thing. And this is how you live until you die. Happy and free. Sartre was right: Hell IS other people, but he should have qualified that with Hell is other people with long-term proximity, obligations or expectations. Because, damn, sometimes other people are heavenly.
Tag: apathy
8 Reasons Young Americans Don’t Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance | | AlterNet
Somebody posted this link on Twitter last night. I think it is an excellent and thought-provoking article. When you look around the world and see all of the rioting and protesting by young people, you might be misled into thinking that because the same isn’t happening here in the U.S. that our people – especially the youth – are happy and content. We are NOT! But, why then, don’t we show it?
Something and Nothing
It is really hot today and I am so grateful for my air conditioner which fills my office with nice cold air. Or so it seems.
Years ago I took an automotive air conditioning course at a technical school and learned to start looking at things in a different way.
An air conditioner does not add cold air to a room. An air conditioner removes heat. It is the removal of heat that makes the room feel cooler. So what, you might say, what does it matter as long as the room is now cool? Well, comfort-wise it doesn’t really matter, but philosophically it makes a great big difference because it brings up the ontological subject of “something and nothing.”
In the example concerning air conditioning we can look at “heat” as “something” and “cold” as “nothing,” wherein heat is “something” that must be removed in order to make it “cold.” Cold, then, would simply be the absence of heat and not “something.” The more heat we remove the less “something” is there and the closer we get to “nothing.” If we remove enough heat and achieve the condition of “no heat”, we would have “nothing” – which would mean that “cold” is “nothing.”
The same way of looking at “something” and “nothing” can be applied to lots of things in our everyday lives. Looking at things in this way, we can see that so much of what we call “opposites” are really degrees of the same thing, only moving closer or farther away from “something” to “nothing.”
What is the opposite of “Love?” Many of us would say “Hate.” But this is not so. The opposite of “Love” would be “Indifference.” By the same token, the opposite of “Hate” would be the same thing – “Indifference.” Love and Hate are “something,” but Indifference is “nothing” – I have no feeling for you whatsoever. I have removed my feelings so far from you that I have slid from the positive, or real feeling of Love or Hate (it’s funny to think of Hate as a positive thing, isn’t it?) all the way down the scale to the “nothing” of Indifference.
This is a very interesting way of looking at things isn’t it. Try it for yourself and let me know what you come up with!
Disagree? Leave a comment.
-m
Naked On A Strange Planet 