No meaning
From an interview with Lewis Wolpert, developmental biologist:
why should there be a meaning? I mean, we want a cause as to why we’re here, but I’m afraid there isn’t one. I don’t find it depressing at all. #
It’s exactly what I believe. Unfortunately for me, I do find it depressing, at least when I’m dissatisfied with other aspects of my life (love, career, money), which is almost always. Not believing that there’s any higher meaning puts a lot of pressure on one to achieve material success.
Where others might take their solace in religion, I tend to take mine in fiction, where I can brush off the fantasy that events fall in place according to an overarching plan and purpose as a conceit for the sake of aesthetics or entertainment.
Surrender to snack food
I’m frequently impressed by the quality of Guy Rundle’s thinking, and in an article in today’s Australian, which is otherwise one of those all too frequent and tiresome explorations of the supposed excess and malaise of contemporary consumer culture, he comes up with this little gem:
Surrendering to snack food and TV in the US is a way of taking yourself out of the competition—for power, beauty, sex, fame. #
True, perhaps, but then, to surrender is to lose. It does no good to leave the competition. The best thing to do is win.
Update: The article gets better. Later we have this:
If we were a genuinely Apollonian, Promethean culture, space travel would have become a global human project, governments throwing trillions at it by public acclamation and we would have colonised Mars by now.
Instead we have devoted ourselves to making devices that allow us to watch Everybody Loves Raymond while waiting in the queue at the bank, and may get back to the moon in five years time, where we were half a century ago.#
Hear, hear. Raymond can go to a drab suburban hell populated by whiny losers. I want to live in space.