Examined Life, Comedy, and Absurdism

 "We'll all be dead way longer than we'll be alive. We're all just a bunch of dead people who haven't died yet." - Louis CK

Talking about philosophy has always bothered me. I am not opposed to the idea of intellectual exchange about the nature of life; I'm opposed as to how people approach it. My biggest qualm with the documentary was the inaccessibility of it. The first few philosophers that spoke were lofty and borderline pretentious with the manner that they spoke about life. Philosophy, to me, has always been a genre of speaking that employs six dollar words that often obfuscate the real point. I generally agree with Einstein’s famous quote, “If you cannot explain it simply, you don’t understand it yourself.”

I don’t mean to belittle the individuals that spoke in the film; rather I believe that they could have devoted some more time to making the content of their monologues accessible to the average individual. If philosophy is the love of knowledge, and you wish to share this knowledge, you should make sure that your audience is willing and able to absorb it. Avital Ronell stated in her segment that she wasn’t sure “…where this film is going to land, who it’s going to wake up, shake up, freak out, or bore…” That is a very important point that she seems to ignore. She is correct; she had no idea who would end up parked in front of this documentary. Therefore, she should have made her monologue accessible to just about anyone.

After finishing this documentary, I found myself to be a bit angry. I listened to award winning intellectuals speak about meaning, ecology, and life for 90 minutes, yet I don’t feel like I have gained much. Maybe it’s the culture that these individuals have immersed themselves in, the culture of high academia, but I feel as if they have very little connection to real life. It’s very easy to sit in an ivory tower and survey existence from an elevated vista. It’s too academic. It’s too lofty. If one truly wants to examine existence, you must immerse yourself in living. Waxing on about the nature of life is absolutely pointless to me. The concept of seeking out a set of human universals makes me laugh. What an exercise in futility. Kurt Vonnegut once said “Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.” You could spend your entire life dedicated to the study of human nature and ethics, but when it comes down to it, we’re just a bunch of hungry animals with oversized brains. God bless our grey matter!

Speaking of grey matter and evolution, I want to raise an issue that I had with Peter Singer’s section of the documentary. I am familiar with his works as an animal rights activist. I generally agreed with everything he said in the documentary with the exception of his view of animals. I have a bit of a controversial opinion on animal rights, especially living in Asheville. I believe that we are animals and there is very little reason to stop us from acting like them. We developed incredibly complex brains and climbed to the top of the food chain pretty quickly. I believe that we have earned our place there. I believe that animals should be treated well; however I will never have an issue eating one. I have an issue with people stating that animals should have identical rights to people. Animal rights activists claim that a cow or a chicken has the same right to live as I do. I disagree. I am the peak of millions of years of evolution and that puts me on top of the food chain. I’m not about to step down.

I started this post with a quote by the comedian Louis CK and a complaint about the inaccessibility of the documentary. I believe that the comedian is the layman’s philosopher. Personally, I believe that a lot of standup comedy is a form of societal self-deprecating philosophy. Comedians take a look at life, how people actually work, and the pains of living and make it bearable to examine. A lot of comedy is little more than philosophy taken a step further. It takes a truly gifted person to examine and describe the human condition in a way that is not only truthful, but also comical. Louis CK gained a fair bit of popularity after his interview with Conan O’Brien went viral on youtube (I’ve posted it above). His basic premise is that we’re all far too entitled to be happy. We should really take a look at how goddamned lucky we are to exist in a world as magnificent as ours. In an interview recently, Louis CK stated “You should act in a way that if everyone acted that way, it would be all right.” I honestly believe that humor is the everyman’s philosophy and we should listen carefully to the individuals that create it.  

In my eyes, there’s absolutely no inherent meaning to life. If you were to take a gander at how infinitesimally small we are in comparison to our universe, you could begin to see just how lucky we are to exist. We’re the product of billions of years of stars and matter colliding. Lucky is a great word to describe our existence; it was absolute chance that we came to become human beings. There are a million things that could have interrupted our evolution and wiped us off the face of the universe. People tend to panic at the thought of meaninglessness. To me, it’s incredibly comforting. There’s no big bearded guy in the sky judging me for eating bacon wrapped shrimp. There’s no overarching theme to existence. There is no predestination. We’re creatures of free will and that can be absolutely terrifying. But once again, if you establish that we’re nothing more than hungry, horny mammals with culture, things get simpler. I’ll repeat what Louis CK stated, “You should act in a way that if everyone acted that way, it would be all right.” I honestly think that there’s nothing more important than that sentence. It sums up the ideal of human interactions pretty well. We’re animals that should do our best to make life better for ourselves, those around us, and those to come.