Something To Hold To
By: Austin Payne
Tags: Albert Camus, Existence, Writers On Medium, Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophy Of Mind

Something To Hold To

Austin Payne

You’re born into a world that has no guardrails, no guidelines, and no direction, no intrinsic anything. Imagine a life where you just spawned ready to exist independently, without any need for parental guidance or nurturing for the first 15 years of your life. Imagine that same world without other humans, without governments, military, law enforcement, business, or any man-made structure of the like. Imagine a world of just you, an environment to exist, and nothing else. This is what life really is, at its barest form.

Everything we’ve added onto the top of the base model of life is nothing more than a mere attempt to organize, categorize, and corral entropy. It works for short periods of time, sometimes-even hundreds of years at once, but eventually everything fails and the earth will reclaim that which came from it. We’ve yet to be around long enough, but just as the earth reclaims that which we created from it’s resources, so will the universe reclaim that which came from its own as well, ending this planet’s several billion year interim existence as we know it.

Life does not come with any inherent maps or directions given to conscious life forms that arise from it. All methods, practices, disciplines, creations, skills, categories, organizational structures, efforts, collaborations, businesses, products, and anything of the sort, is nothing more than an accepted method we’ve learned through experience that aids us in providing ourselves with a more comfortable existence here on this rock. None of it exists intrinsically, it’s all a coping mechanism in an attempt to achieve an unobtainable utopia or some form of temporary contentment and happiness that will suffice for the present day and bring us into the next, just so we can do it all over again.

You’re just born…you’re just…here. There is no direction for you to go, no thing you have to do, no task to complete, no goal to obtain or aspirations to achieve. These are all constructions of our imagination that we’ve accepted as reality due to the societal pressure and structural systematic forms of supposed progression we’ve put in place all around ourselves and been submerged in for generations.

Any sort of sense of direction you’re given or feeling urged to pursue and adhere to is nothing more than a mirage or a false sense of expectancy placed upon you by the modern world you live in, and although it has been around for centuries, the modern life we have takes it even further.

Life gives us this beautifully scary blank slate, and yet it is too blank. You can do whatever you please with it, and yet, that’s the problem. Too many options to choose from, so much so that picking one will only make you acutely aware of all the rest you’ve abandoned. Admittedly this is more of a modern problem now that we have so many options and categories of disciplines that we’ve come up with throughout our centuries of innovation, but a problem in the relevant time period that I am writing nonetheless.

We then face the unavoidable challenger to this, the debate of free will and whether or not we actually have all of these options available before us. Is it all just an illusion? Are we predestined to make a certain decision because of our neurobiology and the unexplainably extensive butterfly affect? My answer is that if you analyze everything far enough the answer becomes I don’t know. We certainly have limited choices because of various factors about our lives that we don’t control, but after all the narrowing down is done, in modern times it still appears to us that we can at least attempt almost anything. Thus, maybe the question or problem isn’t whether or not we do truly have free will, but the fact that from our perspective, we appear to have enough of it to the point that in modern times the amount of options is crippling.

The Details

School is nothing more than an attempt to aid us in this organization of entropy and better prepare ourselves for a life of attempting and failing to do so, it consumes anywhere from 18–22 years of your life as a whole, and sometimes even more if you pursue post-graduate education as well. And how many different derivatives does school create for itself? An endless number of them. School itself has a plethora of subjects, each subject with it’s own derivatives, each school with financial aid, housing, travel issues, logistics of various software used, books, and…I could go on. It’s a whole industry.

Work and employment is just pitching in with the production of things we create for ourselves to make life more dopamine-laden and bearable, with a high percentage of what we do or consider to be important being entirely irrelevant to existence as a whole and simply unnecessary excessive luxuries we’ve come up with for fun and economic gain. All of the various things and categories of things we have come up with and continue to diversify have their own derivatives as well. Marketing, administrative work, production, accounting, customer service, transportation, maintenance, delivery, and…I could go on. Each derivative has countless derivatives of it’s own as well. Marketing alone engulfs SEO, PPC advertising, public relations, graphic design, writing, copywriting, animation, social media, content design, marketing plan, budgeting, and…I could go on.

Life has so many nuanced intricacies of each and every thing we possess, tend to, look after, create, try to accomplish, attempt to secure, look to obtain, or anything the like. Take for example buying a car, buying insurance, maybe a home, getting a job, a degree, learning and educating ourselves, shopping for small things, buying the bare necessities to maintain life, dealing with the issues that arise from things we attempt to own and operate such as a home, a vehicle, a phone, some piece of technology, or anything of the sort. Each and every endeavor here has it’s own process of events which you will go through to complete or fulfill it. To buy a car you must research this, ask about that, check the market price, drive, talk to people, negotiate, decide what you want and need, and…yeah, I just listed at least 10 skills on their own just involved in one measly irrelevant activity we participate in. We will never run out of things to do, not in modern times. Each of the other items listed along with the unending number of unlisted things has its own processes and hoops to jump through that you must see to and have the requisite skills or knowledge of to properly see through, and yet…all of this is fabricated.

Blank Slate

Life’s blank slate is too blank, if you choose to look at it from that perspective. The problem for me always seems to be that, well; I see it from all perspectives, or at least, numerous ones. It is too blank simply due to the fact that, as I’ve just thoroughly explained, if you subtract all the human constructs and false ideas of parameters and reason to do anything outside of survive, for which even that itself has no reason outside of innate primal and evolutionary reasons, then we would have no reason or motivation to do anything whatsoever. So…thank god for man’s innovation and creativity…I guess?

The Bad Good News

We create a false sense of urgency around doing all of these things, which are involved with accomplishing and obtaining these things., just to do it all over again perpetually. Life asks of us none of this, you are simply born and you can’t communicate with the world just as it cannot with you. It won’t tell you to live or die, be successful or poor, to take this step to get there. No, all of this arises out of your very own nature, and through trail and error and nurturing you figure it out. A sense of urgency is instilled in you to do all of these things just to stay alive, and yet, it is a façade. This urgency does not really exist within life, everything is indifferent to you and I.

Without these false senses of urgency, goals that appear to need to be achieved, things we perceive ourselves to need to do, then of course nothing at all would be accomplished and the human race would have either still been a primal nomadic hunter gatherer animal, or, we’d be dead. This lifestyle of productivity and creation that we’ve adopted has led to almost all of our success and happiness in life, and so despite it’s falsehood, it’s very valuable.

This is our way of coping with what Albert Camu refers to as absurdism, or the gap existent between life’s inherent meaninglessness and our internal desire for it to have one. We bridge this gap by giving it our own purpose, by creating things, thinking, writing, doing, building, having, acquiring, planning…you name it, there are countless sub classes to all of these aspects I just named.

This is…a good thing. Without this, we would be truly adrift instead of distracted from the fact that we are born adrift and always will be. Everything we acquire, accomplish, create, build, or do, all means nothing, and yet, that is okay. The relief comes in the form of not expecting it to mean anything, knowing that, intrinsically and outside of ourselves, it doesn’t mean anything at all, and being okay with the fact that it only has value to the creator. To you.