Andrew McIntosh – The Point of Pointlessness (Ineffectual Whinging)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LShimfHrlk8[🡕]
Pointlessness should be allowed to assert its rightful place as the only fair and right state of existence. Worthless inaction, procrastination, indecision, distraction, all things like this are our best bets against a world that condemns us to placing meaning to meaninglessness, and purpose to purposelessness.
The joke of our existence is that it doesn’t have to be, and doesn’t mean anything anyway. The punchline is our innate desire for meaning in existence. Stuck as a paradoxical creature, we find ourselves consciously in a universe that doesn’t mean jack shit, unable to deal with that reality because of our urges towards meaning and purpose and more rather, self importance. Our hubris comes from imagining ourselves as much more significant than we materially are, the center of an imaginary cosmos that is purpose built for our needs. It’s all bullshit, but while our sciences have run ahead of us we’re not even trying to catch up. Instead, we fill the god-shaped gaps with secular bullshit, just as equally pointless and stupid.
We are inundated with information and expectation. Everywhere, we cannot escape images and words and the pressure to perform, think, buy, move, act, be. Kids fill their after school hours with character building activities ranging from sport to dance. People seek out as many friends as possible. All of us have become pundits, constantly chundering out opinions, usually the masticated remains of other peoples’ opinions. Very much like what I’m doing right now.
We’re told there’s a loneliness epidemic. It’s only a sickness when people can’t sit with themselves. Pascal is famous for, among other things, stating that all our problems come from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone. When too many of us are alone, we are faced with ourselves, the reality of what we are inside and the reality of all the front we offer to the world and to the mirror, and we find that in fact it isn’t much of anything at all. Neither a star nor a void, just a standard issue clump of memories, instincts, habits and what not, as unimpressive as any burst open rubbish bag.
Some say everyone has a book in them. How many books exist in the world already? You ever go to an op shop and look through the books there? All these random, worthless looking tomes that’d better serve as compost for the garden or something. That’s what we’ve all got in us. Castings to go in the bin to be chewed and shat by worms to spread around veggie patch. There was only one Proust. Let’s be grateful for that.
The point is, there is no point, and that’s the point. The means we regress to is not zero, it’s a faltering, low minimum of bare existence. We are the most unremarkable of creatures. Crabs, tardigrades, koalas, those animals have reached the apex of evolution and are blissfully unaware of it, just carrying on in their meager actions in bland, unexciting pointlessness. That we’re stuck with abstract thinking and imagination and sophisticated problem solving and all that other intellectual evolutionary overshoot baggage is an unfortunate given, but as long as we’ve been stuck with it, we’ve had to practice turning our minds off and sitting with the nothingness, and very often failing. We long to return to a state of mind that lucky bastards like crabs, tardigrades and koalas are born with and don’t have to learn. We shouldn’t pity animals suffering, we should envy their stupidity.
The point is there is no point, but to get to that point we’d have to abandon millennia of bad habits and worse aspirations. Or at least the last century’s. What with capitalism going apeshit on the human race and the planet, that whole insane “get up and go” mentality, starting with the obscenity of the work ethic, squirming as it did like soft stool out of the arsehole of Christianity, condemning us to mindless labour and activity simply for its own sake. Work for its own sake – what kind of fucking numpty thought that was a good idea? For years, people knew work sucked, that’s why they invented slavery. Can’t we bring slavery back again? A more progressive and inclusive slavery, of course. We could have robots doing stuff and maybe have a prison system where we punish online influencers, consultants, all those layers of parasitical management, self-help hustlers and all those other criminals against humanity to clean the sewers.
We don’t need to learn to love ourselves, or be one with nature or the universe or all that hippy bullshit. We just need to learn to simply be the pointless mediocrities we are. Not to achieve any kind of “bliss” or anything else so exhausting, that’s the sort of thing we should be getting away from. Just to achieve the mediocre, pointless baseline of our mediocre, pointless existence, muddling through, getting on only with what has to be gotten on with, reducing all activity and thought to a bare minimum, consciously re-engineering our genes to favour qualities like laziness, apathy, indifference and a healthy, contemptuous suspicion and cynicism of the loud, flashy, showy, witty, sexy, attention seeking missiles of our dumb species. They can be made to clean the sewers too.
There is no point. There might be a purpose if we choose to believe in the Death Drive. That it isn’t scientifically demonstrable shouldn’t be a problem, we’ve believed in weirder shit than that for centuries, it wouldn’t be that much of a mental leap. A great, collective Death Drive, derived from the inflation of the universe to its current point, to its too bloody long off extinction. Maybe we can pick up Mainlander’s allegory of the universe being the still exploding corpse of a god that went mad when it realised it was alive and promptly suicided in disgust, its gnosis spread in disparate pieces of its matter in the form of Life, but still actually dying, still crawling towards the final spark of living light just going “phoot” and conking out and that’s it, goodnight. Our great project could be not hastening the end of all Life on Earth with antinatalism or promortalism or this-or-that-ism but just gradually giving up the bullshit and excuses and just learning to sit quietly in rooms alone. Learning how to shut fucking up. Not to achieve any great nirvanic bliss but to achieve base line existence, simple, slow, unimpressive and pointless, the very point of everything.
It’ll never happen, though. We’re stuck with our bullshit, trying to derive meaning from the meaningless. It sucks to be us.