What is the Point of Life and Living?

Life. What is it good for?

Absolutely nothing.

And let me tell you why.

My Pointless Explanation About the Pointlessness of Life and Living

If you read about existential philosophy, the whole idea is that life is absurd and we need to embrace that absurdity, while choosing to believe in any singular philosophy, religion, or creed is to commit "philosophical suicide," killing any chance at perceiving what's beyond the veil of delusion. 

But what if those feelings of emptiness and endless misery that culminate from that perception are what can lead to literal suicide?

What if you look back on your life and realize that every memory and experience you've had is no more real than the illusory, emotionally manipulative stories you've seen in movies that you were taught to believe were parallels to life? 

What if most of the memories and experiences you do have are so painful, unfulfilling, and frustrating that you're left feeling incompetent and incomplete, and you aren't even sure if you're really a person or some malformed and maladjusted half-person, half-nothing that nobody takes seriously? In fact, you might say that the prefixes "in-" and "mal-" are the most appropriate ones used to describe every aspect of yourself, with the possible exception of descriptors such as "invincible," "invaluable," and "invulnerable," which are definitely not you. 

What if you believe that your consciousness is somehow incompatible with the vessel of your brain and body, even if the very belief that our essence is somehow independent of our physical circumstances is perceivably a form of "philosophical suicide?"

What if you realize that maybe nature made a mistake with you as you seem to have inherited just about every recessive gene in your family, making the sum total of you incapable of thriving and dispersing in the world?

What if it doesn't even objectively matter what people think of you, but you have to care because otherwise you feel hopelessly inert and alone, and the lonely self-pity won't quit as everyone still seems unrelatable in the most agonizing sense?

You wind up in this massive, isolated mental conundrum when it comes to understanding the point of life, see? We have this idea in our heads that somehow everything is supposed to be so real and that each of our lives matters in our own significant way, but that simply isn't the case when you pull back the mind's eye and look at everything from the third—no, fourth—person. You are a mere speck, a minuscule dot on a completely objective map of the world and only a microscopic piece of thread in a constantly changing universe that would just as soon stomp you out as allow you to thrive in your micro-verse. You have but one life and death whereas the universe has an infinite number of lives and deaths happening at every moment on every plane, from the birth of new liver cells in a developing human fetus to the final stages of a supernova occurring three trillion light years away, to the mitochondria-instructed death of the skin cells between the fingers of the same fetus. One thing ends and another begins, and we reverse trajectories depending on whatever direction the universe goes in at any given time. But in the end, we're all gone, either way.

Every experience you thought was somehow significant can be reduced to a simple attempt to please certain neurological triggers that have been trained over the years based on your personal perception and past experiences. We're complex Pavlovian machines, but we're still just that—biomechanical libraries of sensory memories. Chemicals and soft machinery and bodily battery fluids and unconscious stimuli that keep us going as we venture along the great synapse between pain and pleasure that governs our lives, more often than not falling on the former end of the spectrum as the latter appears to drift farther and farther from our grasp with age.

What we thought we understood about life becomes a confusing mix of regret and resentment, as we contemplate the life we could've had and are forced to reconcile it with the life we can never have. We're all simple victims of our time and place when we think we're somehow in control of our destinies, which we are but only to a tragically limited extent before we reach that "Fade to Black" that doesn't come planned like in the movies, but instead in a very "real" and abrupt way. Even if our brains release that "miracle" hallucinogen dimethyltryptamine during the death experience, who's to say this isn't nature's indifferent way of simply easing the transition into Nothing rather than that Something we hope is over the line, serving as an automated internal lullaby putting us to sleep for the very last time as our pointless lives come to a fruitless end?

Which leads me into more what if's like: What if you die in a sudden impact accident in which the brain is virtually destroyed in an instant, which wouldn't give the brain enough time to even initiate the process of converting serotonin to DMT? What transition would take place then? Also, following such an accident, if the head isn't instantly turned into a Jackson Pollock masterpiece (the only immaculate piece of art you're able to conceive, and ironically both unintentionally and fatally), what if our consciousness is reduced to nothing but an irreversibly infantile husk of who we once were, as in the case of Terry Schiavo? Could she even comprehend a DMT experience when the Good Night finally came for her, considering she was virtually egoless by that point and the defining feature of a "break-through" DMT trip is the loss of ego? It would be unnecessary!

Let me just conclude this by saying that I think the antinatalists like David Benatar (no relation to Pat Benatar) are right. Birth is a curse that nobody asked for and should never be forced on an individual at any point. If couples want to rub their bodies together and stick tubular organs into flesh sockets, they should have every right to, but it shouldn't come at the likely expense of a tormented child's excruciating experience of life.

If you have any ounce of true sentience, then you are aware of just how awful life is, from beginning to end. We're just sitting in pools of agony waiting for that feeling of being trapped to end with the last visceral pain of consciousness.

So, What is Your Point?

I thought I JUST made it clear that there isn't one. There isn't any more of a "point" to life or living than anything else I've talked about in this blog. Learn to read. Oh, and check out some of my other posts to discover why the universe and everything in it is equally pointless, but don't ask me what the point of doing this is, because there isn't one, just like everything else in this sad, sad existence, if you've learned anything.