Alone In The Machine

The Purposeless Hero

By the same standards wasn't i also affirming life and meaning in some strange sense by asserting that life had no purpose and meaning? Wasn't i making that a meaning of sorts by calling it the truth? And maybe there was satisfaction in the thought that one was strong enough to face down despair, to look at a godless, meaningless, and random universe, and by the dab of the intellectual magic wand put it in it's place.

To beat the universe. To say i have seen it has no meaning, no purpose, to see through the game and say it is unconscious and stupid and that i am conscious and intelligent. You're all just dumb rocks, lumps of matter floating around without mind. I see you and call it so, you don't see anything, you don't feel anything, and feeling superior i carry on that way. But cosmos always has the last laugh. These dumb rocks cannot feel pain. They feel no need to try and make sense of anything, unconscious, extroverted, they carry on endlessly without thought. Those rocks don't know they're going to die. I console myself thinking cosmos does not know it is going to die too one day, though it has no conception of a day or a year. I console myself with this, but it's no real consolation. If it dies, i die. If i die, it carries on, and in all likelihood it will outlive me and all of humanity.

This is the battle for survival, physically and psychologically, this is the crisis of meaning. To keep the body alive and pleased, and the mind also. To think that you're alive and it is dead. That you are special. That you have knowledge and it does not, that you have language and math, that you have thought and consciousness, and it does not. To contrive to think that you are fundamentally different than the mother that spawned you.

This was the materialists game, in which the whole universe but one's self was considered, blind, mechanical, and purposeless. Yet one could gain one's sense of purpose through recognizing all this as purposeless. To tower above it like some purposeless hero, and by one's own standards to make a stand though it means nothing.

As absurd as it is, everyone needs an excuse to get of bed in the morning.