Why life is absurd

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/why-life-is-absurd

by esauer91 • 11 years ago

217 143 11 years ago

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com

hbt• 11 years ago

the assumption the author makes is that longevity will only bring us more time and that pretty much everything about the human condition will remain the same.

It is tedious to be human. The amount of time dedicated to maintaining one's body even when young and healthy can feel tiresome.

Longevity is not about extending our misery but about finding a way out of these limited meat bags.

Perhaps there is a meaning and the universe is not absurd, maybe our minds are simply too stupid to figure it out. Maybe if we extended our brains, increased our intelligence...

Only time will tell. That's why we need more of it. That's why it's worth putting up with the daily bullshit called living until it reaches the breaking point.

oliv__• 11 years ago

What makes life so interesting and great in my opinion, are the limitations --and the boundaries of those limitations that people push further and further-- of these meat bags we carry eveywhere with us.

chc• 11 years ago

I feel like this is just "best of all worlds" thinking rather than an actual love of physical limitation. If it were the latter, why wouldn't we just start cutting off limbs and really get some interesting limitations?

jqm3• 11 years ago

Absurdity is a relative state. When philosophy starts trying to bullshit with semantics, I completely loose interest. That's this article.

padolsey• 11 years ago

Yes, but the author explicitly explores the semantics she pushes in regard to other limitations: our size relative to the universe, our inability to fly, etc. With everything taken into account, it is indeed odd that the thing that seems uniquely absurd is our longevity. Why aren't we perturbed by our lack of gills or our inability to walk to the moon? The point of the article is to explore this absurdity. You knew the game before you clicked the link ('absurd' is right there, in the title). So you can hardly be surprised that you were dealt a relativistic sludge.

jqm3• 11 years ago

Well, to be fair, I thought it might have a little thought provoking content. But no.... just sludge.

arnarbi• 11 years ago

I was surprised, because this was on the HN front page.

The point of the article is to explore this absurdity.

I think the point of the article was just to sound smart. It doesn't really explore anything, nor provoke thoughts or insights.

chuhnk• 11 years ago

As someone who believes in Islam this is an extremely thought provoking piece and I love it. It makes you think and question existence. It makes you wonder about what we're doing here and how life would be different if we existing at a different point in time and space. Just such interesting topics for conversation. Life and the universe.

discreteevent• 11 years ago

Maybe one can see religion as simply a rational response to the absurdity of life as described in the article. Life is patently absurd and yet we are rational. Why is that? We don't need to be. The answer for many is that there must be something more. For others the something more is itself absurd. But it doesn't mean that it is an irrational response. Its quite the opposite. It's an attempt to make sense of something that, from a broad perspective, is an assault to our rationality

aikah6• 11 years ago

Maybe one can see religion as simply a rational response to the absurdity of life

The problem is that religion doesn't answer anything(or gives absurd answers,backed by nothing but faith and fishy philosophy),isn't rational because it is not fasifiable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

What is clearly absurd is religion.

aikah6• 11 years ago

While the question of the existence of god as "creator of all things" is a interesting one, anything related to religion can be easily dismissed as a fairy tale or failed philosophy, as the three religions of the book tell virtually nothing about the nature of creation but are more concerned about which "prophet" did what and that mankind should basically blindly follow teachings that cannot be questioned under penalty of death.

"thought provoking piece" ? no Plato is though provoking, Kant is thought provoking. Descartes is thought provoking. Islam and the rest are barbaric and thrive on ignorance, not enlightenment. They are hate pieces that are contextual to the era they were written,not by "a creator" but by men.

But I must admit, Islam is a little more perfect than the other two, as the ethnocentrism of Judaism and the gross absurdity of trinity will not stand that longer. The fact that it tries,however to build up on the other two doesn't save it, from a meta-physical point of view.

Logic teaches us than building something on absurdity only leads to more absurdity.

zaroth4• 11 years ago

I couldn't agree more that our humanity places truly absurd limits on our existence. You get, if you're lucky 30-40 years of solid productivity after 20-30 years of training. Maybe enough time to create one or two solid accomplishments before your capacity for thought, and soon enough your capacity for life is extinguished.

Also consider the economic argument. On the one hand, the level of investment experts make in becoming so is squandered by death. And yet, this also levels the playing field for newborns, since you don't have to compete against the guy with 8,000 years of experience.

I think human intelligence hits an asymptote due to mortality. There's only so deep an individual can go, and a limit on how much you can replace depth with breadth.

We enter and exit this world as babes. 100 years is in many ways a pathetic excuse for an existence. Obviously extending that would have to focus on quality not quantity, and has supremely disruptive economic effects (on par with strong AI) but I do not doubt there are great leaps we will take toward this end over the next 500 years.

One nice side-effect of a millennial-scale existence would hopefully be a more macro and less cyclical approach to "current affairs".

marquis• 11 years ago

levels the playing field for newborns

We see the effects of longer, more productive lives already in youth unemployment and property prices. It may not be until the post-boomer generation that we adjust to this. Perhaps there is a historical period where a generation has lived far longer than the few preceding it, from which we can get an idea how society managed?

sliverstorm• 11 years ago

The historical problem is too many children surviving childhood. The oldest son gets the farm, the youngest gets nothing.

The solutions have been things like:

- subdivide the property (not sustainable)

- The younger son goes to the military, or the frontier, or...

- The younger son courts a daughter in a family with no sons

jqm3• 11 years ago

The thoughts and actions you have are largely a product of your culture, your position in space-time.

Maybe think in classes instead of individual cases. 100 years is nothing. Wheels within wheels. And larger wheels are turning.

_random_• 11 years ago

"...30-40 years of solid productivity..."

Even less, many people choose family.

Also if longevity is achieved there will be plenty of disruption on the way, since there is no "magic pill", but rather a lot of breakthroughs combined.

pcmonk• 11 years ago

I think human intelligence hits an asymptote due to mortality. There's only so deep an individual can go, and a limit on how much you can replace depth with breadth.

I don't know exactly what you mean by "human intelligence", but in general we get deeper not by stretching vertically, but by moving vertically, if you follow the metaphor. Many software engineers today don't even have a passing familiarity with the deeper levels of the stack they're programming on, and that's all new stuff in the last ~50 years.

zaroth4• 11 years ago

Very good point! To the extent that we can build on abstractions and black boxes we stand on the shoulders of giants. BTW, perhaps s/human intelligence/science & technology.

Does this really work about as well (e.g. leaky abstractions but better than nothing) in all disciplines? Learning math is a pretty much a 'climb the ladder' experience. You don't have to literally discover it all for yourself, but you do still have to learn it. I assume e.g. biology is similar; there are absolutely abstractions upon abstractions, but it takes a tremendous amount of work to level up to the point where you are making breakthroughs.

Certainly low hanging fruit abounds, but our individual capacity for learning seems fairly limited in the great scale of things, and has not advanced much in the past few centuries. As a species, we either gain an order-of-magnitude increase in our ability to learn/retain knowledge, or the computer does it all for us. Not sure how much I like the potential adverse side-effects of the 2nd case.

Evolution of science / technology is typically drawn on an exponential scale and we're staring up the side of a cliff ahead of us. There are a lot of marvels in the world we have built, but most of them to someone with 15 years of training in the relevant field are not black boxes or magic. I just imagine climbing much further up the cliff and you start to get to that point.

E.g. I was watching a video of how the Toyota Prius eCVT works last night. I know fuck-all about CVTs, but I have a passing familiarity with planetary gears, and could follow the 15 minute explanation / walkthrough and learned enough to distinguish eCVT from magic. In 100-500 years I would be surprised if the underlying technology of our personal transportation devices would be remotely so 'accessible'.

Isn't it only a matter of time before computers are designing and replicating devices that are sufficiently beyond our capability to understand how they even operate? Or synthetic compounds created by computer algorithms that cure disease but we have literally no idea the mechanism of action? Maybe in a very few problem domains today this is already the case.

pron4• 11 years ago

But why do you think productivity is any less absurd than non-productivity? And why is intelligence relevant to absurdity? Is a butterfly's life any more absurd than a human's?

Humans and humanity don't have goals. The universe is indifferent to us being around or extinct. And it is certainly not our goal to be creative, productive, efficient. We make up goals for ourselves to give subjective meaning to our lives, and that can be plenty. The hard part of anyone's life is to find the existence that gives their life meaning in their eyes. You think extending our lifespan or making society more efficient are worthy goals? So dedicate your life to those goals. But make sure that's really meaningful to you, because, frankly, the universe doesn't give a damn.

zaroth4• 11 years ago

Not everyone is an explorer, creator, inventor, artist, etc. Not everyone takes life as an opportunity to push some boundary further than anyone before. Pull on some thread and see where it all leads...

But I think for those of us who are, mortality seems like an awful joke, and a terrible waste. We just get started and then it's all cut short.

nosuchthing• 11 years ago

You seem anthropomorphize "The Universe", as some God-human like creature?

Structure (and the immense variety), life, mutations, and the known universe that exist rather than infinite disorder and an entropic void seems more than just "indifferent".

eli_gottlieb11• 11 years ago

The universe is indifferent to us being around or extinct.

So what? I fail to understand how this supposedly renders our lives more or less meaningful.

lloeki• 11 years ago

The universe

As far as we know currently, the future looks particularly grim†: on the longest time scale imaginable, the very fabric of the universe is being thinned out of existence. The absurd thing here is trying to make sense out of what definitely hasn't, as all information within this universe will ultimately be destroyed.

Whatever, I choose to enjoy the ride.

† http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

guard-of-terra2• 11 years ago

Even worse, you have around 15 years to find a soulmate, create a family and have all your babies. Men more, women maybe even less.

And you are also supposed to both have a career and find your place in the world meantime.

xlm1717• 11 years ago

The absurdity of life is the absurdity of existence: that there is anything at all is completely absurd and it's doubtful that this will ever be explained satisfactorily.

justathrow2k• 11 years ago

Agreed. The text of the article simply should have been one word, 'Because'. Trying to make reason of the nature of absurdity seems fairly absurd itself.

neuronic4• 11 years ago

You can even split that into steps and levels. Absurdity progresses from the entire universe right down into details like the existence of coffee or oil. Two black liquids that just happen to exist and fuel the world. Can you imagine modern society without them?

But what bugs me most is that a universe without an entity to perceive and observe it is just such a waste of ... energy? It's almost like the existence of the universe implies the existence of an observer. That the formation of intelligent life is an expected result of the universe existing.

mhurron• 11 years ago

it is just such a waste of ... energy?

It can only be a waste if it has some higher purpose.

bemmu• 11 years ago

In a universe without an observer there would be no-one to note how absurd that is.

allemagne• 11 years ago

It's almost like the existence of the universe implies the existence of an observer. That the formation of intelligent life is an expected result of the universe existing.

Seems like a logical stretch, but very poetic.

eli_gottlieb11• 11 years ago

That the formation of intelligent life is an expected result of the universe existing.

Entropy leads to life. Life and entropy leads to evolution. Evolution, given enough space and time to work within, eventually leads to intelligent life.

Intelligent life leads to...?

Spoilers!

rndn2• 11 years ago

Does anyone happen to know whether philosophers have tried to come up with optimal ethics assuming P(universe exists for no reason) is close to 1 and P(god exists) is close to 0? The best we can do is probably to maximize the life span of our species to continually improve these estimates and the best way to achieve that is possibly to minimize suffering. Is it that easy?

AnimalMuppet8• 11 years ago

The Marquis de Sade did. He said, "If there is no God, then whatever is, is right." And he went on to say that nature made man stronger than woman, therefore man had the right to do to woman whatever he wanted.

So that's probably not what you consider "optimal ethics", but given the starting assumption (that there is no God), it seems very difficult to explain why de Sade was wrong.

r721• 11 years ago

Try http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moral_Landscape

dragonwriter2• 11 years ago

"Optimal" based on what criteria? Most moral philosophy that calls itself that (rather than theology) neither assumes the existence of God nor inherent purpose in the universe, however, it does (necessarily) start from some moral axioms (without ascribing them as purposes of the existence of the universe).

Morality doesn't require the universe have a purpose, but morality has to have a purpose.

heurist2• 11 years ago

She doesn't seem to discuss the cause I see, which is that life emerges from the random set of deterministic rules that define the universe. There's no crucial reason life as we know it looks one way over any other - if some portion of the universe had developed different emergent patterns then life could easily be defined according to those patterns instead of the ones we use in our portion, and it would still be absurd. Humans didn't have to evolve from apes; they may have been in the right position to develop more advanced intellects but had giraffes been in the right position then giraffe-ancestors would be arguing about life's absurdity right now instead. Each moment's state depends entirely on the previous moment, and states are not globally optimized at each moment, so they build up into complicated weird-looking systems over time. There's not much we can do about that.

amelius• 11 years ago

Still it's kind of absurd that we are humans, and not, say, mosquitos, for the a-priori probability of finding yourself in the body of a mosquito is quite a bit higher.

heurist2• 11 years ago

If you developed as a mosquito you wouldn't have your mind, you would have the mosquito's mind - you would be the mosquito, not a human as a mosquito. You can't be and cannot have been anything other than what you are, which is a liberating thought. Alternatively, you are everything because if you had developed from the exact same initial conditions as something else you would have developed into that thing as it is exactly.

noobermin• 11 years ago

The thing that people often over extrapolate based on Special Relativity (SR) and other things like Quantum Mechanics (QM) is they think that "relative" (or for QM, "probabilistic") means arbitrary. No, in fact while time is not "absolute", certain things about time for all observers are constrained. For example, the time between events depends on the observer, but use that time separation multiplied by the speed of light--the distance a light ray travels in that time--and take the square of that distance and subtract the square of the distance between said events' locations, this quantity is the same for all observers. This IS a constraint on the "distance" between events in SR.

This really isn't the relativity that the author alludes to, but I have something to say about this too. As physicists, we term this "relativity" the author deals with as "dealing with units." Having a concept of time is meaningless without a given scale. For example, for the ultraintense-plasma interactions that I am discussing in the paper I'm writing today, a picosecond is a long time given that the electro-magnetic dynamics I care about happen on the femtosecond scale. For the hydrodynamic simulations my groupmate will work on, picoseconds are the timescales of significance. Of course, when heating the coffee in the cup next to me, the barista measures timescales much larger than this, of the order of seconds, exponentially longer than both of the former scales.

Life is a complicated phenomenon which captures dynamics at many scales. Thinking about life can be just as complicated, if you let it. An issue I often see is equating parts of life with other parts and thus, using the same scales for both. This often leads us into trouble. Why does it take my friend an hour to shower while it only takes me ten minutes? If I can write a python script in one day, why the hell does it take this junior dev two weeks to make his? Of course, the same issue here is a novice physicist comparing the fs physics I deal with to the ps my friend does, the comparison isn't valid just because they are both "times."

This is why even though life seems short for some people it can seem long for others. Just because 80 years is a year and people are people, any given individual has their own experiences and opinions that shapes their vantage point, and it can be hard to really compare the two. Of course, just like the "real" relativity SR, there are certain constraints we can make on time in this context, many people might prefer longer lives even if we lived 1000 years if millennial* olds are as selfish as us 80-year-ers are. But the diversity in context must be taken into account as it should be for me when I model ultra-intense laser plasma interactions. Context always matters.

Thinking about the context for each person's scales makes our look on life a little less absurd. I think that more often than not, people's motivations (for desiring longevity, for instance) have good reasoning in them, especially when you consider their context.

[*] It's funny that millennial here means people who are 1000 years old as opposed to people in their late teens to early twenties.

Red_Tarsius• 11 years ago

Is it really any more absurd than not living? The whole article – an enjoyable read – seems written with the assumption that there exists a universal constant: human life. Everything that does not match our needs and ever changing desires is absurd. I say that a perfect world would be even more absurd!

Let's not forget that meaning – or the lack of thereof – may as well be a human construct. Life is not meaningful nor meaningless. It only is.

sparaker• 11 years ago

If we didn't had this absurdity we might just have a more absurd life than we have currently.

time4hn• 11 years ago

Did a ctrl+f for "Jerry" and no results were found. Not sure ift his article should be trusted.

zan2434• 11 years ago

TL;DR: In the context of our existence, only the brevity of our lives strikes us as absurd.

nazgulnarsil4• 11 years ago

In [The Fable of the Dragon Tyrant](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLecJrXpOEU), Nick Bostrom explores the fact that we refuse to see the massive crime being perpetuated against every human being simply because of the enormity of it. That we have our health ripped from us without consent is monstrous. Yes, yes, [Calico](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calico_(company)) exists. 100 million in the face of death is a joke. A single sports stadium can cost more than that. Why are our priorities so badly misplaced?

jeffreyrogers2• 11 years ago

Richard Hamming has a talk titled "You and Your Research", in which he discusses what sorts of things you should be working on. The summary is that you should be working on important problems. He then lists three of the most important problems that no one should actually work on, time travel, teleportation, and something else that I can't remember off the top of my head.

The thing Hamming understood, but which Bostrom, et al. don't is that sometimes even if something is extremely important or significant the lack of any reasonable approach to it makes it an unattractive thing to expend effort on. At least until a solution is more tractable.

Further, the idea that everyone dying is some great tragedy is only true in the philosophy Bostrom and others have adopted. It is one of massive egoism and human-centrism that I think is misplaced. These same people then reject any philosophies that lessen the devastation of death on the grounds that they are the fictions of lesser minds attempting to placate themselves over their impending death. But there is no objectively true philosophy. The whole point of philosophy is to invent a fiction that lets you cope with reality in a productive way.

nazgulnarsil4• 11 years ago

The thing Hamming understood, but which Bostrom, et al. don't is that sometimes even if something is extremely important or significant the lack of any reasonable approach to it makes it an unattractive thing to expend effort on. At least until a solution is more tractable. Further, the idea that women dying in childbirth is some great tragedy is only true in the philosophy Bostrom and others have adopted. It is one of massive egoism and human-centrism that I think is misplaced. These same people then reject any philosophies that lessen the devastation of women dying in childbirth on the grounds that they are the fictions of lesser minds attempting to placate themselves over their impending death during childbirth. But there is no objectively true philosophy. The whole point of philosophy is to invent a fiction that lets you cope with reality in a productive way.

I find your conception of philosophy unsatisfactory. Furthermore there are reasonable angles of attack we have on aging. We are making great strides in understanding metabolic pathways of aging in animal models, but we need the research funding to attract the researchers to get the work done. We will make significant progress when you can expect to have a bountiful academic career working on it. Longevity research is currently a career dead end.

forloop4• 11 years ago

The thing Hamming understood, but which Bostrom, et al. don't is that sometimes even if something is extremely important or significant the lack of any reasonable approach to it makes it an unattractive thing to expend effort on. At least until a solution is more tractable.

Life extension has been demonstrated in other species. And medication, such as metformin, has been shown to extend human lifespan (I believe average, not maximum). Anyway, the point is that life extension for humans is perfectly tractable.

Re metformin. From a study[0]: 'Patients with type 2 diabetes initiated with metformin monotherapy had longer survival than did matched, non-diabetic controls. Those treated with sulphonylurea had markedly reduced survival compared with both matched controls and those receiving metformin monotherapy. This supports the position of metformin as first-line therapy and implies that metformin may confer benefit in non-diabetes. Sulphonylurea remains a concern.'

[0] 'Can people with type 2 diabetes live longer than those without? A comparison of mortality in people initiated with metformin or sulphonylurea monotherapy and matched, non-diabetic controls' http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/dom.12354/abstrac...

AnimalMuppet8• 11 years ago

The whole point of philosophy is to invent a fiction that lets you cope with reality in a productive way.

I think that if there's one thing that philosophers agree on, after arguing with each other for a couple of millennia, it's that the point of philosophy is not to find a clever way to lie to ourselves - it's to find out something true.

mhartl• 11 years ago

But there is no objectively true philosophy.

There is, however, objectively inconsistent philosophy. Bostrom would probably argue that most people believe things (such as valuing individual lives) that are inconsistent with complacency in the face of death. Witness, for example, the obstinate resistance to cryonics even among those who would eagerly seek out an untested and experimental surgery to avoid death at the hands of cancer or heart disease. Unless great care is taken to reason dispassionately, the enormity and apparent intractability of death compromise a rational assessment of its horror.

ZeroFries• 11 years ago

Life is meaningless if you live a finite life because no matter what you do it will be washed out in time. Life is meaningless if you live an infinite life because any finite portion of time in your life approaches 0% of your total life time and by definition has no value. And yet, meaning can only be defined by life, because there is no such thing as inherent meaning.

If I created life I would almost certainly make it finite but endow it with a sense of hope that life goes beyond a single life span.

sigmaml• 11 years ago

... a sense of hope that life goes beyond a single life span.

That is one of the conjectures propounded by the Upanishads.

AnimalMuppet8• 11 years ago

We long for permanence, but death comes anyway.

We long for a real basis for morals, but if all we are is matter obeying the laws of physics, morals cannot be anything more than arbitrarily-made-up rules.

We long for meaning, but that's hard to come by too. It usually comes down to randomly picking something and assigning meaning to it, and claiming that now you have meaning. But if all you are is a machine made of atoms that is headed for death, what kind of real meaning is possible?

Here is a deeper level of absurdity. Humans have randomly evolved to have these aspirations (immortality, morals, meaning), but those aspirations can't be fulfilled because all we are is collections of atoms randomly evolved by an uncaring universe. This is a sick cosmic joke. If the materialist starting point is correct, then our persistent aspirations cannot be fulfilled in the universe that exists.

Or else the materialist view of the universe is incorrect. Then our aspirations are not a sick cosmic joke - they are evidence that we are more than the materialist view says we are.

gphil3• 11 years ago

We long for a real basis for morals, but if all we are is matter obeying the laws of physics, morals cannot be anything more than arbitrarily-made-up rules.

That's not necessarily true: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-realism/#2

AnimalMuppet8• 11 years ago

I think that I'm arguing on a different level than that link. If all we are is matter obeying the laws of physics, then you can't say "It was wrong to do that" because I couldn't have done anything else. Each of my atoms is just obeying the laws of physics; that's driving my biochemicals according to the laws of biochemistry, and those are driving my neurons according to the laws of neurology. At no place in there do I have anything that looks like free will, or any ability to make a non-programmed choice.

As Sam Harris said, either I'm a deterministic machine, or I'm a random machine, but in neither case do I have moral responsibility for what I do.

aikah6• 11 years ago

morals cannot be anything more than arbitrarily-made-up rules.

One could argue morals should be based on the survival of mankind. Because that's the only positive goal of it, to survive as long as possible,though, ultimately mankind will come to an end,that's inevitable. On the other hand, as long as there is energy,artificial intelligence could outlast us.It would be mankind's testament and ultimate legacy. I always thought that, if we were to find another alien civilization,it would be through the AI they designed or in form of pure data. And it's probable that it would be available as binary data too.

andrewflnr3• 11 years ago

Survival of humanity is an arbitrary, made-up goal, from a materialist perspective, anyway.

keane9• 11 years ago

No, AnimalMuppet is correct. We are unable to value the survival of mankind as objectively good, as we have no empirical evidence to do so (more accurately: we cannot infer an Ought from an Is).

See this for more on why: http://liamk.org/is-love-real/

Our options are Nihilism/Zen/Absurdity or Theism. And if the former is true, it doesn't matter if we hold the latter. As CS Lewis put it, if the Theists are wrong after all they would have merely paid the universe a compliment it would not have deserved.

tim333• 11 years ago

morals cannot be anything more than arbitrarily-made-up rules

Morals are more than made up rules because if we're just atoms, they have come about through evolution. Presumably any advanced creature would have senses for pain so it does not harm itself at the wrong time, something like happiness when things go well, an instinct to protect the offspring, a sense of beauty which quite likely corresponds to environments and creatures that are helpful for survival and probably some instincts to not trash the environment to the extent it wipes it's kind out. Hence much of the basic morals we have would seem some what inevitable to evolved life forms.

I quite like common sense evolved morals. They can be preferable to what the God inspired likes of ISIS get up to.

keane9• 11 years ago

Morals are more than made up rules because if we're just atoms, they have come about through evolution.

No one contests that if all is material we have developed rules that allow us to survive. The question is: Do our rules refer to Truth (Moral Realism) or are they invented (Moral Nonrealism). The hypothesis that they came about through evolution is not evidence that morals are Real. See the link at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9060768 to maybe better understand what is meant by "arbitrary".

keslag• 11 years ago

The only absurd thing about life, is that through the process, something was created that understood the absurdity of it all.

kristofferR• 11 years ago

We only understand the absurdity of it because absurdity is a concept created by humanity - which if you think about it is quite absurd in itself.

agentultra• 11 years ago

If the poets taught us anything it's that you cannot quantify that which you cannot count and you can't rationalize that which is irrational. We are wholly absurd in this regard; able and enfeebled at the same time. Perfectly capable of realizing that we're trapped in these meat-bags sailing through time to an inescapable doom.

And what do we do about it? Science and engineering life-extending technologies. Write about our memories and discoveries. Make music and art. It's absurd and it seems to work for us.

guelo• 11 years ago

This is a western individualistic philosophy that ignores the amazing accomplishments of the human species. In other more collective cultures bringing shame to your tribe is a moral reason to kill yourself because the individual is not the end all be all. We are ants in a giant, unimaginably successful ant colony. Focusing on the life of an individual ant is what is absurd.

ctdonath• 11 years ago

Humans have had about 10,000 years of interesting & productive history. At best, a human lifespan is about 100 years. That's one hundred 100-year lives back-to-back. That's...not much at all.

nly• 11 years ago

An average generation was probably about 40 years for most of that. So I'd say about 200-300 generations. It's not much, but I still kind of feel that as a species we haven't done very much at all in that time. Personally I prefer to think we're in our teenage years as a species.

gear54rus• 11 years ago

Life is perfectly balanced in this regard, I would say.

Only those without a clear focus on their goal may ask a question 'why am I here?'. If you've ever achieved something in your life that others will admire or build upon - it was not in vain. That's why we are here: being its members, to advance humanity as a whole.

That's also exactly why we should never achieve immortality (so that we have motivation to do something in out limited time) and if we do so, it would be one of the worst events humanity has ever encountered.

Sadly, this day most people look at this world through prism of financial wealth, but trading things (often completely useless things, I might) back and forth can hardly be considered an achievement future generations can benefit from. All in all, in the modern world, realization of one's potential has stepped back to give way to greed and that cannot be called progress in any way.

EDIT: Well isn't that a knee-jerk reaction. People always reject this argument for some reason and always fail to come up with the solid reason for this. Is this what we've come to as a humanity?

q845712• 11 years ago

i think she's wrong that time is the only absurd thing:

i've often wished i could hibernate; there's a ton of victorian art that shows a clear obsession with humans flying like birds; i spent many childhood afternoons trying to hold my breath longer (so i could stay underwater); there's been tons of fiction, philosophy, science and engineering put into talking to animals...

however, most of all, i agree with all the comments above suggesting that the notion of permanence itself is absurd, our insistence on a hard-nosed materialist viewpoint is absurd, our insistence that we're smart enough to understand the universe is absurd (we're little smarter than our dogs and cats, who we're sure can't possibly understand the universe)

cdahmedeh• 11 years ago

Life is absurd because of our imminent death. For some reason, we have the greatest troubles in accepting that everything is transient. After pleasure comes eventually pain, after relaxation comes work, after life comes death... We live here as if our lives on Earth are eternal, while all evidence has shown that it is not.

Even more absurd is the unfairness of the whole joke of life. I'm lucky with an education and a good job giving me a chance to focus on experiencing nuanced pleasures instead of fighting to survive. Being mentally ill does give me share of anguish, but mine is nothing compare to the poor, unfed and terminally sick. Their life is even more absurd: a passage through a brief but painful passage through anguish, suffering and hopelessness.

As an ex-Muslim, I have trouble adjusting to this: meaning is just a human construct. Things don't have meaning on their own, we assign them a purpose ourselves. Religion gave me re-assurance of eternal afterlife where I get a second chance to live a life without the evil and suffering of this existence. However, it did have a fatal flaw: it was false hope.

Now, life went from a short journey into another realm to a serious emergency. Now, I have to make of what I was lucky to own; but it can all go away in a single accident. After being a pattern-seeking religionist, everything is just starting to seem so random...

bitwize• 11 years ago

"Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it feels like an hour. Sit next to a pretty girl for an hour and it feels like a minute. That's relativity." --Einstein, attributed

hyperliner• 11 years ago

I don't think that life is absurd. There are, however, some absurd aspects to it:

- why would anybody waste their time, given that life is so short? The problem I guess is that "waste" is relative. Who wasted their time? Me in school, or my buddies partying?

- it's absurd that your luck is pretty much determined by where and when you were born. It's absurd that some people think they are so accomplished and scored many runs but without realizing they were born on third base

- it's absurd that the probability is high there is no God. why would something so mathematically amazing as the universe generate something so brutally absurd as conscious life?

- I think it is absurd that I just wasted 5 minutes of my life thinking about this instead of tucking my kids to bed or reading them a story for bed time.

Well, I guess life is in fact absurd. My original premise is invalid.

rquantz• 11 years ago

Life's too short to read this comment thread.

rasz_pl• 11 years ago

Looks like author just watched newest Adam Sandler movie.

fan• 11 years ago

The logic behind the author's central thesis seems to be:

1. Humans live about 100 years. 2. The highest human ambitions, like writing a great novel, can only be reasonably accomplished in a well-balanced life if that life lasts more than 1000 years. 3. By definition, our life is absurd because we don't have enough time to reasonably accomplish our highest ambitions.

She concludes that human life could be made less absurd by extending life to 1000 years -- this I disagree with.

The problem I have with this thesis is that I think the phrase "highest human ambitions" is really a shifting goal. It's a goal that is set by the accomplishment of a person of extraordinary talent who dedicates her entire life to that one pursuit.

We think today that a brilliant novel on the order of Tolstoy is a high human ambition, only because it's the limit of what a human can do. Instead, consider if humans lived much shorter lives, reaching their cognitive peak at age 15. In such a world, few people would have time to learn calculus, and so solving a differential equation might be within the highest order of a human's mathematical ambitions.

Conversely, let me suggest that if the average person were to live to 1000 years, the definition of human ambition would scale accordingly. Imagine the absolute masterpiece symphony that Beethoven could write if he were alive today. He would have hundreds of years of experience. He would have seen the evolution of music and integrate all these advances in his repertoire. He could afford to spend 50 years writing his mater symphony. This level of music will be now our new target of ambition.

The central problem reduces down to this fact. The high water mark for an ambitious goal is always defined by people in that field who are unreasonably talented and dedicates an unreasonable fraction of their lives to the field. If these experts lives the same number of years as I do, since I'm a generalist of average talent dabbling in their field, I will never be able to accomplish anywhere near their level.

The absurdity here then seems to stem from the intrinsic human desire to always compare ourselves to the best, even when we realize we don't want to commit to the field (with good reason) as the best do.

bilalasif1• 11 years ago

The explanation of this and the question contradicts each other. Life is absurd, but if you really believe that then you should also know that you can't tell WHY!

Every human must experience and keep on experiencing or otherwise taking your life might be more less painful than living it.

pbsk• 11 years ago

Absurdism [1] is one of three philosophical doctrines (along with existentialism [2] and nihilism [3]) that try to reconcile the fact that we live in a meaningless universe when our human tendency is to seek value and meaning in life.

Existentialism argues that we create our own meaning by living life and exercising our free will. Nihilism counters that there is no meaning and so nothing matters. Absurdism is the acceptance that life is ridiculous and by defiantly laughing at it we can live authentically.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absurdism [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilism

Why life is absurd

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