Some thoughts on "Life"

I suppose it happens to us all. You wake up at some indeterminate point in the night (for those who don't have clocks in their bedrooms anyway) and your mind begins to whirr with thought. The thoughts rush on and you silently nod in agreement with the thoughts that you are having. This has certainly happened to me more than once and often I have determined to write them down later when I get up. Of course, you never do because life gets in the way and it becomes just another lucid moment lost forever in the mists of time. Well, this time, I have actually made the effort to write down what I was thinking about and to use it to meditate on the thoughts I was having. So what follows will be a mash up of the thoughts I had last night in my bed and now as I write, remember and muse on those thoughts that I had.

I suppose, in a way, it really started last night before I went to sleep. The thought occurred to me that no one gets born by their choice. In that sense every one of us is born without our will being taken into account. Our birth, the fact we are given life and brought into being at all, is the choice of other people. This strikes me as partly selfish. Although not a parent myself, it does seem to me, observing from the sidelines, that some parents are selfish. They want a child for themselves. I wonder how many parents give thought to what kind of life their child will have or how much pain or misery they might be storing up for their offspring? My guess would be that many never think of that at all, at least not until or unless things go wrong. And yet these things, in the abstract, are foreseeable consequences of having, or giving birth to, a life. So why don't more people think of the downsides of being alive when bringing a new life into the world?

Maybe these people consider that although life will certainly include some bad it will also contain much good. Lives, of course, are very different. Some will contain little pain and some will contain much. In that sense, once a life has started and you are thrown into existence you pretty much have to suck it up and deal with what comes down the pipe. You can't refuse life and go back where you came from. The clock only ticks forwards. But, to get back to the point, perhaps people consider that life, overall, isn't that bad. That would be reasonable, wouldn't it? I don't think so. You can't live your life on someone's behalf. Each life is individual. You cannot measure someone's pain by how you measure your own because you are not comparing like with like. Human beings are not robots and are not built to the same specifications. Much less do they experience life in the same way. Your appreciation, or lack of appreciation, of life is not commensurable with that of another person. We each make our own minds up and human beings, in general, have always valued that fact about our species.

I raise all this because, for the longest time now, I have actively said to myself that, were it possible, I would give my life back. I don't accept the idea, for myself, that life, although a mixture of good and bad, is "worth it" over all. For at least 10-15 years now I've said to myself that if it were possible to reject life and give it back then I would. If there was a button you could press or a deal you could make where it meant that you suddenly had never existed then I would press that button or make that deal. You might now be asking about all the things I would miss that you value or all the things I would never experience. To me, that argument holds no weight. A person who never existed has nothing to miss and has no ability or desire to value things. These are the problems and issues of the living. And the difference between being alive and dead, existent and non-existent, is very great. Put simply, people concern themselves with the problems of the living. Unsurprisingly. And they find it hard to think in any other way. For the same reason I've never understood people who couldn't appreciate why someone might take their own life. To me, this is obvious: dead people have no problems.

My thinking in this, of course, is guided and shaped by my own experience of life. I don't regard myself as having had a particularly bad life. Certainly, there are people who would seem to have had worse ones and its not hard to think of examples. But, as I said before, everyone is different. Its a mug's game to start comparing lives one with another. You can only really address your own appreciation of your own life. And I haven't appreciated mine very much. There are certain issues I've had to face daily for many years and I wouldn't be me or live the life I lead without them. But that is my comprehension of what life is from my own experience of it. You will have yours. Quite a lot of people seem to think that life is a gift and that it is ungrateful or bad to reject it or despise it. I must admit that I don't understand this, to me, irrational mentality. If life is a gift then its surely the unwanted pair of socks your granny gives you. Overall, nature is random without a guided direction or purpose. You were the sperm that made it and fertilised the egg. Its not as if any intelligence selected and formed you in a womb, made you who you are and set you on your way. (Yes, I don't believe in gods in any sense.) You are just the result of a couple of human wills and lots of random factors no one power had any control over. There will come a time when parents and doctors will be able to choose the baby they have and start to make selections both for physical appearance and mental faculties. I don't envy those people who will be actively engineering the birth of yet more people. What will happen when the children do not turn out to be the things that were selected? Can people really be created in laboratories?

I do, in a sense, see life as something mystical. But this is mystical in the sense of profound or complex or ungraspable. I don't see it as mystical in the sense of it being from a higher power. We are, all of us, life forms created in a physical universe. The conditions that make life possible, and we don't know what they are or why life happened at all, are just there and so, in turn, are we. I don't see any inherent or deep meaning to that. It just is and any meaning we do find, or fail to find, will be on our own terms. Recently, I've been following the Twitter account of a shepherd in the Lake District of England. He's become a minor celebrity thanks to a book he has written about his way of life and the fact that one of his sheepdogs, Floss, recently gave birth to 10 puppies. For the last week or so now he has been posting sometimes graphic pictures of the lambing season that he is currently dealing with. I have looked with childlike innocence at the pictures he has posted of lambs being pulled out of a sheep or, new born, lying on the grass covered in mucus and amniotic fluid. This is life. This is the wonder of life. The wonder of life to me is that it happens at all.

But that it happens at all is, for me, also the problem. Its one that existentialist writers like Sartre or Camus saw too. For the world, life, does not make sense. There is no way to square the circle of your existence. There are endless "don't knows", you are full of fallibilities and, as a physical being, you will suffer and die for change is a constant of the universe. Things do not, and are not meant to, stay the same forever. As a being with higher brain function you will also likely have to muse on all of these facts and deal with that too. "Life is suffering" has long been a truism of mine even though, at times, more positive souls have tried, and failed, to dissuade me from it. I just see too much evidence to support it. You, too, may say that's not very positive and I would probably concede you are right. But that is to miss the point. The point is that you can only be true to yourself. For although you can appreciate and think about life in general, you only ever live one actual life: yours.


You can hear my music which muses about life and thoughts about life at my Bandcamp.

My Eccentric (but no less valid) View On Life

The thoughts started to come as I lay on my bed, the light fading away from the day to become night once more. I drifted in and out of sleep as the darkness covered me like a blanket, everything silent except for the playlist of Trent Reznor music I had in the background.

Why do people recoil when someone, perhaps a musical artist in a song or a writer in a book, seems to suggest that suicide is a way out? It struck me that these people act as if death is a secret and life is an experience you are not supposed to be able to escape from. Indeed, more widely there seems to be some unspoken, unarticulated idea that taking your own life is in some sense not allowed. Not allowed by who? For what reason? And then I think of the picture that often gets tweeted or shared on social media about suicide. Its this one (it was easy to find):

I despise the logic of the poster this girl holds up. I despise it for a number of reasons but the main reason I despise it is for a crucial piece of logic its missing. Let's for a moment skip over the error that "suicide does not end the chances of life getting worse" (it does, because there is then no life to get worse!) and move on to the second half of the poster. It is said here that if you kill yourself that your life will never get any better. Well, true enough as far as it goes. But YOU WILL BE DEAD. And dead people don't have to worry about trivialities like "better" or "worse" at all. They are DEAD. So the poster enunciates a living person's perspective and not a dead person's. Worse, it gives a particular living person's view and not a universal one. Usually when I see that someone has tweeted this again I feel a flush of anger that once more someone is tweeting illogical banalities, trying to lock people into the prison of a life they don't share in a world in which some don't even want you to know that by taking some very simple steps you could have escaped from existence, forever, in very short order. What are they scared of? Some people's lives are unutterably bad and I would doubt their sanity if they DIDN'T want to escape them.

Now I don't really mean to go on about suicide. As I've already suggested, the subject makes a lot of people antsy and nervous - most often for reasons they can't even describe. But I needed to report the thoughts that just came to me unbidden as I lay in the silence of my room. I really do enjoy silence. It is very spiritual and very cleansing to the soul. It strips away all the effluvia of life that attaches to you when you chat and interact with others and get the grime of life onto you. Life is not a nice thing. You collect things that you need to periodically wash off just like the dirt that causes you to shower or bathe. I recommend sitting, lying or even walking in silence (and preferably darkness) to anyone. As I lay on my bed my thoughts broadened from this initial thought to thinking about life itself.

Now I don't claim my thoughts about life are mainstream. I don't claim they are moral. To be honest with you I could really care less about being either of those things. But, as with my music, I would try and claim that my thoughts are honest - in the sense that I have given time to them and they are as accurate a description and summary of them as I can give at this time. Maybe that counts for something and maybe it doesn't. I know I'm not the only person who thinks but there seem to be a lot of people who don't. So here goes.

The thought often occurs to me (every day) "What if life is the prison and death is the escape?" I wonder who of my readers can even appreciate that as a genuine question that makes their mind do real work thinking about it. But that's a real, genuine and live question for me. If it was put to me as a proposition I wouldn't have too much trouble accepting it as true. Because life can seem like a prison to many people. For much of my life it has. If there were a mythical button you could press which took your life back to point zero, the point of your conception, and, instead of living your life, you never existed instead, I could and likely would press that button. I can, hand on heart, honestly say that there hasn't been a day in my life, now stretching over 46 years, when I have felt that life was worth living. Not a single day. Of course, like others I have good days and bad. But that's not the point. The point is is there anything that would make a human life worthwhile? Can life mean anything if it ends?

Of course, there are consequences of accepting this premise. Crime and punishment, for one thing, is radically re-envisioned. Death, on this view, is seen as an escape from any punishment (which is why the death penalty makes no sense. You are essentially freeing the criminal from the burden of life). Any crime you can commit you eventually get away with. Human beings are mortal, they all die. They all escape in the end. At the point of death it matters not if you lived 70 years "free" (human freedom is a whole other discussion!) or 70 years incarcerated. Every punishment has a terminal limit: the length of your life. I think this is why religionists and people who talk in spiritual terms try to change the game and extend the narrative. They want to be moral. They want to believe that bad things do get punished and there is justice. But, I'm sorry to say, I just don't consider myself that naive. And, trust me, I am naive in a great many ways about a great many things. I even wrote a song about my naivety once. But not on this. There is, ultimately, no justice. Morality is just the power to impose your views on others. For where there is no power there is no morality - whether that's an invisible being or a Govt with arms and a legal system. I think a lot of the genuinely bad people in the world know this. I think many of them are a lot more realistic about life than the white knights and the angels on the side of good who maintain the pretense of a fantasy world of justice and good just to get them through the day.

It was a radical moment for me when I started to think about life in cosmological terms. We are like ants on a really small and insignificant planet that is placed nowhere special in the universe. There are billions of galaxies just in our bit of the universe. On one theory there may even be billions of universes, a multiverse, in which every possible version of you is living every possible life you could live. But you are stuck, in the meantime, with the life that only you can live because you are stuck being you. Even if this life of yours lasts as long as a human has ever lived (around 120 years I think) that's just an eye blink of time, a finger snap. Its nothing. Its inconsequential to anything. The universe will literally not notice that you ever lived and your impact against the huge background of all that is will be as good as nothing. I don't say all that in any nihilistic sense although I do believe that most things human beings put their faith in are merely egotistical devices for their survival. I say that because I think its actually true and it is in some sense liberating to come to some conclusions about things like that.

Ever since I've thought that we are all as meaningless and inconsequential as we think ants are, or microbes or amoeba or bits of dust, I've felt somewhat liberated. The idea that everyone escapes from life because we all die I find liberating too. Nietzsche, a great intellectual inspiration for me, was a man who suffered with many physical ailments over a number of years. He writes in one passage that the thought of suicide brings him safely through many a night. This is because the thought that life might go on forever is actually not a terribly appetising one. Imagine living the life you live forever. It goes on and on and never stops even as you age. I don't know about you, but actually I hate that idea. For me, the knowledge that I actually won't exist for very long and that I will NOT exist forever is a whole lot better. In fact, knowing that I will die is, paradoxically, what has kept me alive until now. I'm not ashamed to say that I have personally struggled more than once with the idea of suicide. I'm alive because I know that whatever I suffer won't last. Because it can't. We live in a physical universe and in a physical universe everything changes and all things degrade and pass away.

I just finished writing a set of musical pieces about what it means to be a human being. Maybe you have heard some of them. I literally think about what it means to be human, to be alive and associated things, every day. Seeing pictures people post online of the sea or mountains or animals makes me wonder. Its like the purpose of my largely empty life is to ponder on what life is for. The answer might be that its not for anything. Life just is. A chaotic and insensible universe, the expression of no will but just of random events, gave birth to thinking animals from its own illogic. Those animals can think and reason and they turn that reason on themselves but it drives them mad and makes no sense and they realise that there often aren't any reasons or any logic to things. And that makes sense on one level. Logic is human and only of use to humans. The universe doesn't have to be logical. It is unlogical. But this drops a huge turd in the thinking of human beings who need logic to function. Their egos need to capture and control the information and sense data that they receive so they can make use of it. Humans need order but the universe is not ordered. It dawns on them that, actually, life, the universe and everything is not about them at all. They are just by-products, peripheral, inconsequential.

Or something like that.....


Thanks for reading. You can hear my Human/Being series of music at elektronischeexistenz.bandcamp.com