The Meaning of Existence

The achievement of pleasure and the absence of pain both lead to boredom. Both pain and pleasure are quantitative disturbances of chemical equilibrium. Hope and fear both emerge from an inherent realization of the dominance of equilibrium, of a certain biological constancy. We hope for pain to end and return to us to a previous satisfactory state or perhaps payoff for a different but similarly constant state. We fear loss of what gives us pleasure or increase of what causes more pain, desiring a return to equilibrium.

The subjective qualities of pleasure and pain differ, but each are an excess of energy of a certain time and duration which cannot last. Our demand is an energy demand on the mind to work and so has a somatic origin. Emotions as the word suggests put us in a state of motion, for they ultimately share the same purpose. All irritation.

The purpose of all life is death. From nothing to nothing. The unliving outnumber the living in the universe.

In Spanish what is fun or amusing is divertido, a diversion, as my sophomore Spanish teacher told me. Passion from Latin "pasus" means to suffer. A passion for life, for anything, entails suffering.

The state of indifference characterizes us for more of our existence than pleasure or pain.

We spend much of our lives asleep, largely indifferent to the outside world. Our days are intermittently interrupted by day dreams where we are consciously indifferent to our immediate environment. One becomes lost when reading an engaging novel or envelopes while watching television or film.

Hypnotism, meditation, and the placebo effect demonstrate the great power the mind has to be indifferent to certain stimuli and simulate reality. Our mental state can be altered by intense focus, because of suggestion by ourselves or others, without the somatic effect of external stimuli. 

Our brains can't possibly process all the information of our senses, electrical activity in the brain occurs before we are conscious. To imagine is to think less than we perceive. To be actively indifferent to stimuli. The mind didn't evolve to mirror reality but to serve the promulgation of the species. Man never realizes how anthropomorphic he is, as Goethe said.

Freedom of the will consists in doing what we will do unimpeded externally and the conscious functions in agreement or ignorance with the act. As per Schopenhauer; man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills. What bodies do is different than what the mind commands, they do what they do. We're just lucky that we either are unaware of the physical causes of our actions or are in conscious harmony with them.

The meaning of life is found in the act, that which sustains and enhances our own lives. Anatomical change comes about as a consequence of behavioral change. "Birds do not fly because they have wings; they have wings because they fly"-Robert Ardrey.

Life escapes meaning outside of our individual activity, but we are able to spend much of it in complete indifference to this reality. It is only in our waking moments of self-reflection that the meaning of life has any significance. But we create this problem for ourselves, for demanding meaning from existence is to view existence as something alien and itself in demand of justification, to treat being as an individual thing to be analyzed. We make the meaninglessness of life a problem because we demanded justification in the first place.