Should I Jump?, or Rocks Sure Have It Good

Like I said the other day, I'm constantly hunting for methods to create purpose (i.e. meaning) in my life.  Methods to the madness.  Better yet, methods to the meaninglessness.    I firmly believe that I create the meaning in my life.  But creation is irrational and exploratory not logical and systematic.  In other words, I don't know what I'm thinking when I create meaning.  I kind of dick around until something fits (what a fantastically inappropriate way of saying that; so inappropriate, I can't bring myself to delete it).

So I get frustrated.  Nothing except my daughter adequately fits a satisfactory sense of purpose in my life.  Much comes close, but there is always some microscopic failure that I cannot articulate.  I try and fail.  I try.  And fail.  However, no matter how many times I fail, I can't stop.  I require meaning like I require air.

There is a sadistic piece of me, albeit barely perceptible, that unconsciously fantasizes about the demise of meaning in my life.  It's like the itch you get in your feet when standing on a ledge: what if I jumped?  What would really happen?  The irrational (stronger) part of my brain insists on the existence of meaning.  The logical (weaker) part of my brain knows meaning is just a conglomerate of distinct fragments of bullshit glued together on a background of nothingness in my brain. My life will eventually end in meaninglessness.  Any thoughts of immortality are a joke.  (What do you think about your great grandparents?  Probably don't make a meaningful impact on your daily life.)  So why struggle with it so much now?  Why cling to the impossible?

I do not want to lose that which is meaningful in my life (see Babies and Suicide).  I wonder if there is something in between?  An intensity of being.  An existence with an imperceptible self.  A purposeless now.  I wonder if there is a way to be a rock.

The meaning of life redux

I've been listening to The Meaning of Life from the Teaching Company (I have listened to and forgotten hours of academic material through them). Something Professor Garfield mentioned hit a cord with me. He said that Nietzsche's vision of meaning in life is turning one's life into art. In other words, letting aesthetics guide your motivations and you will find meaning.

This strikes a cord with me for the reason I mentioned yesterday: there is an irrational, incalculable, illogical, intangeable aspect to our perception and understanding. Our sixth sense is an ill-defined "art". What Nietzsche is telling us is that there is no rational explanation for meaning. It can not be sculpted with language or calculated with numbers. It is that whatever that we see when we are not trying to see.

How does this relate to medicine? Who gives a shit.

Apparently I do. What it means to medicine is that our goals may need some tweeking. Instead of the objective criteria of absence of disease, we may need to consider the irrational criteria of meaning. In other words, our patients are expressions of our art. Success is ill defined and irrational. It may not be represented by a lab test.

Pattern recognition and an identity crisis

What the fuck am I? (Too many "fuck"s in this blog? It just works so well at getting readers...) You'll definitely notice an identity crisis weaving it's way through these entries. I guess it's not so much a crisis as I am content with not ever finding out who or what I am. I do believe, however, that the search is a necessary and vital process. In other words, my identity - my life for that matter - is boiled down to a fruitless search. In order to prevent utter personal chaos, the process then has to be the goal. And since meaning is a human construct (yes, I will be serving drinks and similar bits of bullshit wisdom in hell) and a rite of consciousness (more nails in the a-religious coffin), brain-chaos-containment is meaning.  So, Aristotelian logic leads us directly to the idea that I have discovered the meaning of life: process not achievement. The world is now saved. You're welcome America (standard hilarious Will Ferrell).

But back to question at hand: what the fuck am I?  Phenomenology has us bracket our perceptual habits and start fresh (more on phenomenology when I know what the hell I'm talking about).  So starting fresh: I am atoms.  I am carbon; I am oxygen; I am hydrogen; and I am sprinkles of other molecular crap.  The table my computer sits on (I won't discuss the computer itself because I don't pretend to understand whatever magic the Warlock Jobs used to create it) is also made of similar, if not identicle, molecular crap.  So what am I in relation to it?  I am exactly that: a relationship.  When I see myself in the mirror, I am looking at the same particles as I see in a cat, or a table, or tree.  I am different because of the relationship of those particles.  I am a pattern, not a substance.

What does this mean?  I am a construct of my mind.  My brain interprets the relationships and creates me or the table or the tree.  I don't exist as I think I exist outside of my head.  So what the fuck am I?  I am whatever my mind wants me to be.

Babies and suicide

Probably an unfair title.  There isn't much literature on babies committing suicide oddly enough.  What I mean by it is I never understood the concept of suicide until I had my child.  Strange to think the concept of mortal self limitation should arise out of my blonde haired, blue-eyed bundle of joy but it did.

I always thought that if I hit rock bottom somehow (whatever rock bottom is) then, in the very least, I'd be the world's greatest stuntman or the best war photographer of the century or the first man to eat 10 gallons of cookie dough a day.  Rock bottom would, in a sense, be freeing (another topic altogether already well put together by Chuck Paluhanakanaksanahun [possibly misspelled] of Fight Club fame).  If I truly examine this, then freedom to me was no longer caring about my mortality.  My life and death was the meaningful base from which all sprung.

With the advent of my daughter, that base changed.  She added a dimension that trumped my mortality.  Her physical safety; her emotional and intellectual growth; her potential role in society; my future enjoyment in watching her grow up; her present and future dependence on me; and much, much more all represent a richer, more immediately present meaning to my existence.  In other words, although the I've always enjoyed my life and am quite fond of who I am (contrary to the self-reflective brow-beating I give myself in this blog - you hurt the ones you love), the fall to rock bottom was not truly a long one.  I was standing on the 3rd floor veranda of a beautiful summer home in San Sebastian.  With my daughter, I am standing on top of 100 Burj Khalifas ).  I'm so tall now, everything I used to know and care about is microscopic.  I understand suicide now because I could not tolerate any other view than the one my daughter gives me.  My life became richer but more fragile with the birth of my daughter.

Camus said that the one philosophical question worth asking was why not commit suicide.  It is a brilliant question that, if you truly think about it, is a difficult one to answer (the question of course being the unanswerable "what's the meaning of life?").  I say flip it on it's head: why commit suicide?  What could you have in your life that truly means more than your life?  What would die over?  (Napoleon suggested that he can make a man die over a piece of ribbon.)

Chuck: [http://chuckpalahniuk.net/]

Burj Khalifa: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burj_Khalifa]

Camus: [http://www.tameri.com/csw/exist/camus.shtm]

Philosophy and the Meaning of Life: [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/life-meaning/]

Napoleon Quotes: [http://www.military-quotes.com/Napoleon.htm]