Day 14: We’re Weirder Than We Think

It is clear to me that being a passionately mad man is more reasonable than being a boring man of rationality.

In short, I’d rather let my passion drive me to hell, than get a free ride to heaven from reason. I’d like to continue to reflect on the last few years of my life. I have no idea how long this thread is going to last. I truly hope that it will continue as long as I need to help myself to get on the right track. The idea idea I was reading a book written by a famous writer and spiritual coach Osho on the notion of stability. He writes:

There’s no such thing as complete state of stability. The moment you feel stable is when you are dead. All things that make life worth living all comes from destabilizing experience.

The truth is, as explorers (of your own mind as well of the external world), we will never arrive the state of stability as long as we are breathing. Unless you’re not an explorer, than you don’t need to worry about anything because you are already dead. If we shall seek stability, then we shall also seek death since death is the only stable state of human beings. But seriously, do you really want to live in the world where everything is so stable? No surprise. No excitement. No nothing undetectable? Every day the same patterns repeat themselves? (all of these questions would eventually lead me to write about Jean-Paul Sartre at one point in this post I have a feeling). We’re living in the world shaped by the constant forces, whether that be natural phenomenon, or the projections of our own mind onto a mental plain created by our impressions of natural phenomenon that make us feel as if we are being destabilized from within.

The funny thing was last time I checked my Facebook (which was about, umm…yesterday) I realized that most of my former classmates (and professors) from the technical school to which I had gone have been married and having their nuclear families for years (even those who seemed socially awkward whom I though may not be able to find anyone to be with let alone the right one). Even former classmates (and professors) from the technical school were able to find, I suppose, the love of their life. I am not sure whether or not they think of me as a weirdo (which is probably fine since as Jean-Paul Sartre used to say “we’re weirder than we think”) who is still in school and finding my own life’s path (if they think of me at all since I didn’t have a lot of friends back then). In fact, one of my good friends who came to my father’s funeral five years ago said to me, “Non, your life must be really suck: no friends, no money, and no career, and now that your father has just passed away. I have nothing to say, but I would hate to be you.” I remember what this friend of mine said really well because I was actually quite surprised to hear that. At that moment, I wasn’t sure whether I was surprised because she said something that I never thought about (seriously, I never thought about that before) or because she said something that was so true that I had no idea how to comprehend it. At the end, I think it’s a little bit of both.

It seems as if, in order to have stable life, everything must fall into places. I am going to assimilate Jean-Paul Sartre‘s way of seeing through the superficial world as such.

Life is a lot odder than we think (going to the office, having dinner with a friend, visiting our parents – none of this is obvious or remotely normal), but it’s also as a consequence far richer in possibilities.

It seems as if there’s only one path to make life a fulfilling one, and it’s all begin with a proper sexual conduct. That is, to them, one cannot simply want to engage in casual sex for life, but need to fulfill one’s sexual needs properly, ideally in the following order. First, one must find a partner with whom one would like to engage in an intimate activity. Second, one needs to convince that partner to be with one for life, and in order to make that happen a set of ritual propriety would have to be put in place to make sure that such pronouncement (and announcement to the community of both) is loud and clear. In order to be a family, third, one must let such intimate activity lead to conception; and, forth, lo and behold, one must let an infant human being be born. But why? Really. My skepticism creeps throughout the entire process. Just because we have sexual genitals, why entails us to have use them in the way that lead to conception? Why is sex inside the domain of marriage more proper than casual sex? Above everything else, what right do we have to give birth to someone else when we don’t even know what life is? As John Locke once said in the Second Treatise of Civil Government John Locke (1690), children owe nothing to their parents because the parents never ask them first whether they would like to be born into the world. Following Locke’s logic, it’s the parents who owe their children everything, including the elementary protection and the responsibility for raising them and giving them proper education, food, and so on. I wholeheartedly do not see why I should feel the urge to get married in order to have children. I might get married because I believe in the morality of telling someone that you would like to commit to that person for as long as you are still breathing, but I simply do not believe that just because nature give both of us a penis and a vagina we must use them to conceive a person into this chaotic world, especially when I still do not know what it is all about. Sure, I could rely on the children to help me think about the meaning of it all, but is it fair? What if my children do not want to know the meaning of it all and think that being born in the world is the most senseless possible thing like I do? That is, just because we have these sexual genitals, again, does it mean that we need to get married, give birth, raise a child, and expect the child to take care of us when we grow up? What happen if the child doesn’t want to take care of us once we are old?

To others, the way I live my life, and the way I think about it, might sound weird: I have no plan to get married; I have no set career path on which to move on life; I have no plan to buy an asset; I have no interest in buying anything expensive to show off my success; I have no interest in thinking about distant future. All I want to do is to focus on the present. I want to cherish the moment that I have in the present.