[Music] it begins with nihilism the philosophy that life has no meaning and the world is here for no reason do a little dance make absolutely no love get incredibly down tonight suddenly existentialism is getting popular the main idea being okay maybe we aren't here for divine reasons and the world has no absolute purpose but that's kind of neat because it means you have no shackles beholden neither to Gods nor Kings first and foremost you're not an employee or a citizen or a digital Nomad but a person first you are a person also meaning that every
decision is your own but also meaning no one is coming to the rescue and most importantly no one is really in charge and it's hard not to sympathize today with that have you looked around where are the real adults billionaires don't seem all that happy politicians don't seem all that uncorrupted and personally I won't be taking any life advice from someone who dresses up as a chess piece the beauty of that anarchy though one can self-create meaning life is not something done to one but something one does Albert Camu had other ideas though a French
Algerian thinker originally destined to be a footballer until he contracted tuberculosis Camu agreed with some of existentialism diagnoses but disagreed about the medicine sure we're abandoned to Freedom he granted but so what the real problem is that we are machines hungry for meaning and purpose yet destined to look for it in a universe that is nevertheless cruel unpredictable and apparently completely apathetic to us we will be hatched matched and dispatched all the while probably never working out what it was all for don't look at me like that you clicked on this video well kamu reasoned
there are maybe only three courses of action available to us in such a ridiculous situation one refusing to play the game as in ending one's life and don't do that please two a leap of faith or placing faith in something that there is meaning somewhere this could be anything from believing in a deity to Consulting a sentient melon called terance before making major life decisions or three absurdism full recognition and accept of our absurd situation of the harnesses and slights of life of the facts that will probably never attain absolute truth and purpose and not
surrendering to that in a blaze of nihilism but living in spite of it a revolt against meaninglessness itself as kamu put it the only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion because it isn't meaninglessness that hurts Camu insisted it's the contradiction of needing meaning and not getting it particular particularly our inability to let go of the contradiction itself for example ever since my teens I've been rather terrorized by the question why is there something rather than nothing because what we're really
asking probably is why is there anything here at all meaning presumably either the universe had a beginning in time or it had no beginning in time well all right let's imagine everything began with the biggest of bangs 14 billion years ago fine but if that was the beginning of time and stuff existing then there can't have been anything before that by definition nothing but nothingness and how can nothingness create stuff even if something exotic preceded the Big Bang like a Quantum fluctuation or whatever well all right but that's not nothing that's a different something and
we're back to asking the same question what came before that and that and that looking for the first uncaused cause until one's head simply [ __ ] explodes okay maybe creation has been around forever then the universe had no beginning in time well that solved the whole something from nothing problem maybe the Big Bang was the next iteration in a cycle of universes expansion collapse expansion collapse yeah okay but how does that work either maybe some weird perversion of general relativity maybe the universe creates itself from the end of time but again shouldn't that have
started somewhere even if the starting point is in our future How can any system exist without a defined beginning and yet if the universe had one then it must have come from literally nothing G I used to find if I thought about this for too long it inspired the same kind of horror as when you realize that third joint was about idea why do both positions seem reasonable and yet completely contradictory in academic bxy talk this is called an antinomy two premises that work fine by themselves but won't reconcile a paradox in other words and
the beginning of the universe is hardly the only one like is matter infinitely divisible or is matter finitely divisible can you keep blowing particles open until you reach a string or Quark or something at the bottom of nature that you can't divide anymore and if so why or can you just keep peeling the universe open like an onion divis ible all the way down and if so why and for that matter have all events already happened and we just have to live through them much like sitting through a film where the real is already there
in the projector or is the present the only true moment the past gone the future not existing yet in either case why or are all of our choices predetermined by every material state that came before us giving us no real choice in anything how to tell the difference likewise one day could we conceivably know everything about how the world works and on that day could we be sure there wasn't something missing ignorant of our own ignorance how would we know then there are all the wibbly human paradoxes why do terrible things happen to good people
and vice versa why can't we gain full control of our own minds where is the line between the conscious and the subconscious are the mechanics of Consciousness us as well are we all of it the mechanism and the mind cuz it doesn't feel that way and finally if we've been abandoned to total freedom and drift about in the existential ocean captaining a ship of one with no rules to life but those we give it how are we supposed to find meaning or belonging or just the Bare Basics of a reason to live in a universe
this unkind and uncaring where hopelessness seems inevitable pitted daily against tragedies with no explanation maladies defying medicine and let's be honest other humans who are just straight up cck how can anyone live like this with so much unexplained or random or totally contradictory who wouldn't lose their minds who wouldn't fall into nihilism who wouldn't lose all hope and reason for being uh Albert kamu wouldn't that's where all this is heading obviously another small detour first though because I wrote this next bit while I was quite quite High hey in 1914 Ernest Shackleton and a crew
of 27 embarked on an expedition their plan to cross the Antarctic by foot so off they sailed south on the South Atlantic Ocean four and a half stars on Google reviews for some reason by early 1915 however their ship the endurance was trapped in pack ice inexorably drifting South in it soon enough the ice kindly crushed the endurance and sank it and soon enough there they were lost on the Frozen Plains of nothing and so they wandered by foot by Lifeboat for months They Came Upon an island finally Elephant Island the first land in 500
days but so what they were still marooned and no help was coming Shackleton and a few others set off to mount a rescue effort while the rest of the crew stayed behind to try and well not die Shackleton found help 800 mil later returned to his crew and everyone got home alive eventually and even though the expedition was a failure technically it's remembered today as one of the greatest Tales of Modern Survival but what's strange is reading about how the crew lived all those months stuck intolerably cold waiting for Shackleton to come back with help
though knowing it was very unlikely he would return they put on silly plays for each other made a tradition of moonlight walks and laughed even laughed often a th000 miles from anyone perhaps the most isolated humans in the world at the time they retained their Humanity as Alfred lanzing writes in some ways they come to know themselves better in this lonely world of ice and emptiness they had achieved at least the Limited kind of contemptment theyve been tested and found not wanting which is exactly where absurdism begins because aren't we on the ice freezing and
isolated aren't we tortured by the same questions the stranded crew were is rescue coming will we make it what the hell are we even doing here aren't we just as marooned thrown into this era in these situations in these bodies by physics and chaos and biology and history and God knows what else and expected somehow to live through it and how do we live through it oh Camu replies by being very very French with passion and freedom and a Revolt with the passion to pursue the joy of Being for the sake of it with the
freedom to at any moment choose to continue to choose to live to create hope internally and with the spirit of Revolution a rebellion against the harshness and strangeness of existence itself nothing will last and maybe I'll never understand what the world is here for what I'm here for then I'll live even more intensely I won't just gaze into the abyss I'll maintain uncomfortable eye contact with it I'll get laser eyee surgery so I can stare even harder you think you're empty Abyss you should see my [ __ ] DMS mate what would kamu do Eat
Pray Love sure but equally well drink blaspheme shout profanes at lamp posts take up the mandolin die one's dick blue no idea but this is the burden of Freedom this is the weight of being this is absurdism perhaps there's a holy Watcher in the sky perhaps we're an alien experiment perhaps it's all just atoms and chance who can be sure not us not yet but we can dance in the mystery absurdism says with the dance as the point all along born into an absurd theatrical performance that makes no sense and rebelling against the lack of
sense Itself by being better and Kinder and weirder living inside a paradox and still doing the dishes knowing we might never know what it was all about and carrying on anyway courage isn't the absence of fear courage is the Mastery of fear it is saying to oneself wow that thing really scares me I guess I'll just go ahead and do it anyway though likewise absurdism isn't an answer to the mysteries of Life why bad things happen where the universe came from or how to survive this [ __ ] it's just asking the question oh God
what if we never achieve final explanations what if we never see the big picture what if we go our whole lives without ever having known what it was all about and replying to oneself oh look it's a puffin it's a nice Puffin it's a nice day oh we're alive that's unprecedentedly weird and cool whether it's fully explained or not let's uh let's go for a beer sorry one more thing ah another Shameless book plug huh I got very bored of writing sci-fi last year and just at the point I was contemplating throwing myself out the
window for something to do I I started messing around with poems instead it was a lot more fun than sci-fi and I was quite surprised to find it turned into a book eventually it's called poems for the lost because I'm lost too which I think is quite self-explanatory it's about absurdism really and before I changed the subject category it was also momentarily number one in the poetry about death list which for reference you can reach the top of by selling just two copies of a book so thanks to my mother and my mother for that
for once the digital and print versions are both out at the same time which is now I'll leave a link below if you're interested anyway as is tradition I'll leave a link below if you're not if you do end up giving it a read thank you ever so much and if you don't totally understood we're no longer friends and I despise your very being big love as ever cheers [Music]
