Good behaviour is the last bastion of mediocracy.
-Henry S. Haskins-


Ever wondered about the meaning of life?


My family. How could I tell the story of another human being? Take this as a snapshot - as it is - and look into the eyes of these people. Who's alive? Who's dead? Where are they today? Does it matter? What do you feel?


Lauri G. (Lauri Gustav Strengell, born 1966) Anna, born 1958, died 1981, a few years after this snapshot Silja, born 1956, alive and well with 3 great kids and a husband Minna, born 1960, Alive and well with two great kids, divorced Dad, Ragnar, born in 1927, Alive and well. Aliisa, (Aliisa Otteliana Walve, born 1928, died 1996)

THE UNBEARABLE REALISATION OF THE ANSWER TO THE QUESTION


I'm lying in bed, unable to sleep. I feel anxious, my stomach is in knots but there is no reason for it. The world collapses around me to make a small box. I am locked inside the box. I feel claustrophobic, I want to get out!

Everything is well as long as I can distract myself from the painful realisation of the pointlessness of everything.

Why are we here? What for? What is the purpose of my few decades on the surface of this planet? What is the meaning of life? The only honest answer to all those questions is hard to take. There is an answer and instinctively we all know it. But we don't like to say it because realising the answer is painful, almost unbearable. I will say it here:

There is no meaning to life at all. There is no point, there is no meaning. The only way to survive this truth, to avoid insanity, is distraction. Distraction is very important. It is the only way to survive life without going mad.

Distraction works like magic, like my photocopied charts stamped with a statement "this is not a chart or a copy of a chart". Deny it and it ceases to exist. Believe it and you'll have it. Tell yourself that your life has meaning and it has. You have entered the human illusion - stepped away from the truth which is too painful to take. The paper on my chart table still is a copy of a chart. Life still has no real meaning. Stop distracting yourself though, stop avoiding the truth for a moment and look at it in the face. Life, the whole human existance, the whole seven billion lives have no meaning. No purpose. None whatsoever. Hard to take?

There are many ways to distract ourselves from the horror of meaninglessness and purposelessness. Religion is popular and fills the void quite well. Overworking, overeating and having a hobby to fill in the moments between eating, sleeping and working also helps. You can even say that the meaning of life is life itself. That's handy and works grammatically. But it also makes the answer same than the question. An endless loop where the answer throws you straight back to the question. That's a good distraction.

To truly realise the lack of meaning in everything, creates a vacuum, a void inside me that I must fill before I fall into it. When I don't work, sail, drink, have sex, eat, watch television, write, sleep or do anything but lie still on the bed, I fall into the hole. I fall into the void, the reality of meaninglessness surrounds me, the world collapses and I enter the unbearable existance in the box. The world boxed up around me, the void, the lack of meaning all around me. It is what R.D. Laing would call an untenable situation. Impossible to go, impossible to stay.

My head, the bastard brain of mine will not stop. Like a receiver tuned to every frequency at the same time, millions of thoughts - in fact every thought there is in the world - are playing an endless cacophony of life in my head. In this hyperactive process of thinking and realising I constantly seek ways to turn my brain off. Or at least turn the 'noise' down. To stop. To rest. But life goes on. For some time longer.

Among many other ways - too often drinking - I create meaning for life by writing, hoping to die an author.

I hope to make a difference. Like Gandhi, Mandela and King. Like Laing, Yu Tang and Sartre. Maybe I should be more controversial in my words. Worry less about upsetting people and upset more people. Not for the sake of upsetting people but for the sake of saying things that need to be said.

The truth is that I will die one day, cease to exist. But life goes on, in the same kind of way that we go and have dinner after seeing news about a genocide in Rwanda or war in Iraq. "Terrible" - people will say and get on with their lives. We read about genocide, murder and war. Then we go and have dinner and watch a movie. So what we saw doesn't really matter? We're too busy distracting ourselves to realise that it doesn't really matter anyway.

Writing these thoughts here helped me to climb out of the hole, out of the void. Temporarily. I filled the void with my thoughts, thought myself out. But I keep standing on the edge and no doubt will fall in many more times.

Within a few more decades after my death most people who knew me would be dead too. Within a hundred years from my death I'm as good as someone who was never born. I'm as good as the 40 000 children who die of hunger every fucking day. We don't know them either. No-one will miss me and eventually even the gravestone gets pulled down for lack of maintenance. (The web site will get closed much sooner from not paying the annual fee). It doesn't matter. It is a truth.


Charlie suddenly realises what her life is worth...


Number of people who died on the planet since this page loaded