[This “Individuality and Absurd Rebellion” series of posts introduces you to ideas you’ll find in Eric Maisel’s most recent book Redesign Your Mind. You can learn more about Redesign Your Mind here.]
People who thought about these things arrived at a point where it seemed absurd to continue chatting about absurdity. We still took absurdity as a bedrock feature of existence but it became a secret, unmentionable feature. We buried it and we sank further into despair.
We turned our back on the concept and tried to put it out of our mind, even as life grew more absurd. We swallowed hard, ran this way and that, kept very busy, and purchased antidepressants. But who were we fooling or kidding?
We had made a serious mistake, a grave miscalculation, by trying to turn our back on absurdity. Now it is time to face it again. Let us exclaim “How absurd!” as we look out at the human spectacle. Yes, that hurts, but we are obliged to be honest.
And it does hurt. It hurts because we know that it translates as, “Life is ridiculous,” “life isn’t fair,” “nothing really matters,” and so on. We may exclaim “How absurd!” with a bit of a laugh, as if we’ve amused ourselves, but that laugh is deeply bitter.
Now we must revisit those absurdities, as bitter as they make us feel, for the sake of understanding our real challenges and crafting our next steps. Here are a few of those absurdities, just a sampling, about as many as we need or can stomach.
I may be a person who values helping the less fortunate and I may also be a cynical person who wonders if the panhandler I’m passing is perhaps a professional beggar playing me. How absurd that I am both people! But I am.
I am the same person in the morning and in the afternoon. I possess the same values. But how those values play themselves out—what predominates, what comes forward, what “wins”—is so very different those few hours apart. How absurd!
You read an interview and are once again shocked to discover the extent to which powerful forces in society are mugging you and gagging you. You really should fight back, shouldn’t you? But how absurd to imagine fighting back! Fight back? Really?
Having read that demoralizing interview, you know in your heart that you should drop everything and fight. But isn’t that completely absurd? What difference could you possibly make? And there you sit, precisely as impotent as you feel.
But isn’t it likewise completely absurd to simply go about your business as if you hadn’t noticed? Here you are, working fifty hours a week at a terrible job so that you can pay the rent in an overpriced city, and they steal from you. And you do nothing?
And not only can’t you fight back, maybe you don’t really want to fight. Maybe all you want to do is write your psychological thriller set in 1920’s Paris. But what is the value in that? Who needs another story? How absurd to devote your life to that!
And maybe you value your loved one above all else? But what if he is about to engage in some terrible betrayal or some sordid deed? Should you still side with him, this love of your life, perhaps to your everlasting shame? How absurd!
Yes, our laughter is bitter. How could it not be?
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Shutterstock image
Portrait of pre-Socratic philosophers Heraclitus of Ephesus and Democritus of Thrace. They are called the Crying Philosopher and Laughing Philosopher. Conjectural portraits by Hendrick ter Brugghen
