The ultimate ends
In this text, I’m contemplating the possibility of postulating values in the age of nihilism and thinking which ideals are still worth worshipping, while referring to the theories of Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore and others.
In his novel Demons (1873), Fyodor Dostoevsky is contemplating the moral consequences of atheism. In the chaos of revolutionary Russia, a collapse of religious belief culminated for him in the rise of nihilism, cynicism and moral relativism – which in turn led to the rise of destructive social movements and political extremism. His recipe for the restoration of meaning and morality in society is the return to Orthodox Christianity that he viewed as the only foundation of spiritual life in Russia.
Dostoevsky was right: nihilism and cynicism are bad. They are for weaklings who are unable to endure the collapse of traditional values – religion, national pride, family, and other moral frameworks imposed by large communities – yet equally unable to choose or legislate values of their own unlike true Übermenschen.
But contrary to Dostoevsky, resorting to religion is for weaklings too.
I keep having conversations with people who confess that, at some point, they realized the vanity and futility of pursuing the faux values of modernity – money, status, power, and began searching for something greater to devote themselves to until they ultimately found the answer in God.
What? Every time I am struck by this leap of logic.
Centuries ago, in the pre-Enlightenment world, religion was a justified tool for explaining both the nature of the cosmos and humanity’s place within it (August Comte: religion is false but necessary), but to choose religion in the 21st century is to commit oneself to something fundamentally invisible and unknowable, to voluntary submit one’s reason to blind faith – not better than an act of self-inflicted lobotomy and self-blinding. If there’s a need for worshipping something, I’d rather worship cats.
There’s almost definitely no God, the world is essentially purposeless, and there’s most likely nothing awaiting us after death.
Dating market inefficiencies
She’s a 10, but she’s not a marriage material. He’s perfect, but there’s no spark. Women hit the wall at 28. Red flags. Green flags. The ick. Dating up versus dating down. He’s avoidantly attached while I’m attached anxiously. Narcissistic trauma. Love bombing. Trauma bonding. Emotional availability. Is it a situationship or a delusionship? We’ve been dating for five years and he still hasn’t proposed. If he wanted to, he would. She’s giving me breadcrumbs. He’s out of her league. What’s your SMV? He broke up with her over text.
This is a snapshot of daily dating discourse on Twitter.
Jesus. At this point, it’s time to accept that we’ve failed as a species.
Everything about modern dating discourse is fundamentally wrong. It is a source of modern day neuroticism and anxiety, and anxiety is, in turn, one of the strongest correlates of modern unhappiness.
Traditionally, the horrific mental burden of searching for a mate was alleviated either by the institution of arranged marriage or by a religious spirit of humility: choose someone good enough, end the search, marry asap:
Now, in the globalized world with its globalized markets and urban polities with millions of men and women, as well as the Internet that gives us access to billions, we no longer search for someone good enough among dozens but optimize for the best among thousands.
We, as individual agents of the human species, are now running complex optimization algorithms on the edge of eugenics: searching for the best, most attractive, most compatible, most loving partner and, as a result, for the most optimal set of genes to ensure the most optimal offspring. In the realm of qualia, it all may feel beautiful and magical. But beyond the beauty of feeling and the pleasure of companionship, beyond the magic of the universe experiencing itself, nature is enacting its cold, calculated programs.
Death and dying
What is human history if not a never-ceasing wave of generations washing over old cities, buildings and streets – a wave that comes with its own life energy, its impulse of vitality (élan vital), pursuits and aspirations. Each generation comes with its paraphernalia – tiny things and objects of use, pictures in frames, tablecloths and curtains, geraniums on windowsills, fridge magnets from Sacré-Cœur, whistling kettles.
With time, the spark of energy fades. The wave retreats. Moving trucks arrive, the little things are taken away. Decorative pillows with Egyptian camels, ceramic mugs, oil paintings in golden frames. Removed. Floral bedspreads, puppet figurines, wallpaper from old photographs. Out. Apartments get renovated by crews of indifferent men. The last memories of things fade. Tarkovsky’s Mirror, a home where it always rains… À la recherche du temps perdu. The past is not to be found. It all goes into the dark. Only buildings remain, waiting for a tidal wave of new inhabitants.
The bodies are placed in black bags and taken away from their tiny shoebox homes.
***
I thought I knew everything about death.
I knew the concepts of temporality and mortality. I had read a thousand stories about the afterlife, the favourite theme of myths and religious tales. I knew of Chronos and Thanatos, of the Sumerian afterlife and the Elysian Fields, of Valhalla and the topography of Dante’s Inferno. I knew of the Greek goddesses of destiny, the Moirai, cutting the threads of fate. I had seen the Zoroastrian Towers of Silence and the cremation pyres of Varanasi. I knew everything about the final days of Socrates and about Heidegger’s description of death as the horizon of life. I knew that the fear of death was pointless because Socrates said we cannot fear what we do not know…
Except the death I knew about was an ontological concept, an abstract idea.
I had never faced the corporeal nature of it.
Only happiness matters, or eudaemonia with constraints
Only happiness matters. Not the legacy. When people discover your legacy, you’ll be dead. Like Kafka. Or Bach, or Lovecraft, or Emily Dickinson (in Hades, Achilles didn’t care about his immortal glory). Or you’ll be 60 years old, like Rothko. But in order to live happily, right here and right now, the thought of leaving a legacy brings peace and a sense of fulfillment. It’s not serving others that matters, but the sense of meaning and purpose that brings satisfaction and therefore happiness. If Mahatma Gandhi hadn’t enjoyed what he was doing, he would have quit fast.
In a well-balanced soul, it’s all aligned.
But happiness is a confusing word. The Greeks were more accurate in calling it eudaimonia, which is sometimes translated as flourishing.
Man is happy when he flourishes. What is flourishing? It is becoming everything a man can become.
No wonder the Greeks had only a vague semantic demarcation between words such as virtue, excellence, flourishing, and eudaimonia (happiness). See the Nicomachean confusion: What is virtue? What makes one happy. What is happiness? Living in accordance with virtue, and so on. Man is happy when he becomes what he can become. And since human nature does not differ greatly across most individuals, this means becoming excellent in universal human virtues: being courageous and just, wise and moderate, great-souled, and so on. It also means becoming what a particular individual can become. The latter part differs across individuals.
Those who can’t handle my lows don’t deserve my highs
The whole life is a sinusoid between hypomania and subsyndromal depression. Periods of intense enthusiasm alternate with periods of intense despair. Ecclesiastes 3: ‘There is a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing’. This captures the sinusoid rhythm of human living really well. Unlike, say, Aristotle who argued we should aim for the golden mean between two extremes.
There’s no such thing as a stable mood. It’s either really bad, like life-shatteringly bad, or really great. And I don’t even have BPD. I’m normal. This is normal. *
I’m kind of a depressive person. I’m prone to depressions. But I’m also effective and prone to prolonged states of productivity and excitement. When things are going well, those productive states prevail, and the depressive phases occupy only a small fraction of time.
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