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Why life is absurd

#1
C C Offline
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/201...ore-155456

EXCERPT: [...] Absurdity occurs when things are so ill-fitting or ill-suited to their purpose or situation as to be ridiculous, like wearing a clown costume to a (non-circus) job interview or demanding that your dog tell you what time it is. Is the lifespan of a relatively healthy and well-preserved human, say somewhere between 75 and 85, so short as to render it absurd, ill-suited to reasonable human purposes?

[...] To assess whether human life is usually too short, consider human aims and purposes. People are commonly thought to have two central concerns: love and work. [...] We could abandon love or abandon work, but giving up one fundamental human pursuit in order to have time for a better shot at the other leaves us with, at best, half a life. And even half a life is not really accessible to most of us — life is too short for work alone.

By the time we have an inkling about what sort of work we might enjoy and do well, most of us have little time to do it. By the time we figure anything out, we are already losing our minds. Age-related cognitive decline begins in our 20s, just as our prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for judgment, is finally completing its lengthy maturation process. The rate of cognitive decline increases as we age, with a steep increase after age 60.

We don’t fare much better with time to love. It takes time and experience to develop the wisdom and maturity to choose an appropriate partner and love him or her in a way that doesn’t make everyone miserable. Relationships need attention, and attention takes time. Children take lots of time too, and some reflection and experience, yet we are biologically made to bear children when we are young and unwise.

Maybe the problem is not that we don’t have enough time but that we waste the time we have. Seneca famously thought this. (“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.”) Most of us seem unable to refrain from “wasting” time. It is the rare person indeed who can be maximally efficient and productive. For the rest of us — that is, for almost all of us — Seneca’s advice about not wasting time seems true but useless.

[...] What if we lived for, say, 500 or 1,000 years? Would our ambition tend to grow to scale, making life seem absurdly short for human purposes, whatever its length? Is it human nature to adopt outsized ambitions, condemning ourselves to absurdity by having conceptions of reasonable achievement that we don’t have the time to realize? Why haven’t we scaled down our ambitions to fit the time we have? Is the problem our nature or our lifespan?

There may be no way to be sure but consider the fact that, although we have ambitions unsuited to our lifespan, we don’t seem to consistently adopt ambitions unsuited to our species in respects other than time. It’s not absurd to us that we cannot fly or hibernate. We don’t think the fact that we can hold our breath for minutes rather than hours or memorize a few pages rather than a tome makes human life meaningless. We don’t find that our inability to read each other’s minds, speak to animals, glow in the dark, run 60 miles an hour, solve complex equations in our heads simultaneously or lift thousand-pound weights makes a sad mockery of human existence. This makes it more likely that, given a longer lifespan, life might seem less absurdly short for our purposes.

Just as a lifespan can be too short, it can be too long. For many, it is far too long already. Many people are bored with life, irritated by the human condition, exhausted from suffering, tired of living. For those for whom life is too long, a longer life would be worse and, quite possibly, more absurd. For some, however, life seems too long because it’s too short, meaning life is rendered so absurd by being short that even a short absurd life feels too long because it is pointless. A life made absurd because it is too short would be rendered less absurd if it were significantly longer.

A million-year or infinite life might be too long for human nature and purposes too, though such a life would be so radically different that we can only speculate. An infinite life might become tedious, and people world-weary. Lifetime love commitments, a source of meaning now, would likely cease to exist. A million-year or infinite lifespan might be too long and slip into absurdity. To everything its time. Both a too short lifespan and a too long lifespan present absurdist challenges to a meaningful life....
#2
Magical Realist Offline
Given the physical and mental decline due to aging, I think all this obsessive pining for more time and more life is unrealistic. Noone looks forward to being 80, yet that is increasingly lying in the cards for more and more of us. There's dementia, Alzheimer's, loss of bowel and bladder functions, the wearing out of joints making walking painful and laborious, neural twitches and shaking, the sense of being burden to the family that has to be looked after, and the loss of all that is culturally considered attractive in our appearance and mannerism. My sister learned in school that the highest suicide rate is for men in their 70's. It makes sense. The loss of all that made you feel like a man--sex, intelligence, strength, independence, attractiveness, a career, your spouse. No, I'm not a big fan of life quantity. Give me a life with great quality and richness, and then let me go early. At any given time, I'm ready to go knowing I will be spared the depressing drudgery of hanging around in a senior center disabused of all that gave my life meaning and value. And if that isn't an absurdity, I don't know what is.




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