In the Myth of Sisyphus, Camus gives us a philosophical theory, or rather, perhaps, a vision, you accompany the odd and disturbing view of the world of The Stranger.

Sisyphus was condemned by the Olympian gods to spend all eternity in fruitless labor, rolling a rock up a mountain until it would roll back down of its own weight, again and again and again.

Nothing could be more absurd, Camus tells us, than a life of such futility.

The “absurd” is this vision this sensibility that has come to preoccupy the modern mind or at least to a large extent my own.

Camus defines the absurd as a confrontation between rational human beings and an indifferent universe.

It is the view that, despite our hopes and expectations (for justice, for salvation, for peace and harmony), the world does not deliver or care.

It is noteworthy that Camus is an atheist. But he also says that if there were a God, it would not matter, life would still be absurd.

In The Stranger, Camus suggests that death makes life absurd. This view has been around since ancient times.

The character of Sisyphus makes it painfully clear that an eternity of futility s more absurd than a mere lifetime of futility. Death, then, is a kind of blessing, an escape from perennial boredom.
Sisyphus and Ecclesiastes both suggest the absurdity that our lives amount to nothing.

One of Camus’s target in the Myth is the contemporary glorification of science and objectivity.

Galileo’s retractions before the threats of the Church were more comic than tragic, Camus suggests, because it is life, not truth that really counts.

The absurd is born Camus suggests, of the impersonal, abstract, scientific view of the world and what one contemporary philosopher has called the “view from nowhere”.

Ultimately only personal experience is meaningful.

Reason is characterized by the question why?

This is a quest for explanation, for justification for an account that makes an action or an event comprehensible.

But every why leads to another why?

All series of why questions end nowhere.

In terms of understanding as well as satisfaction, life is essentially absurd.

Understanding does not give us satisfaction.

The absurd is a confrontation between our rational minds and an indifferent universe.

Sisyphus can be interpreted in two ways in this context.

He devotes himself to his labor so completely that he must be considered happy. Thus, the role of reflection, of reason, is a problem. It leads to a question “What does this amount to?” to which the answer is nothing.

He understands his task worth resentment, and his resentment of the gods thereby makes his life meaningful. Sisyphus rebels by refusing to accept the absurdity imposed on him.
Camus present reason as problem.

Rationality has different meanings.

It refers to consciousness on the one hand. Only human consciousness can see absurdity in a repeated pattern.

It refers to the intelligibility (comprehensibility and justice) of the world on the other.

Either we find the meaning of life in our lives. Camus seems to be saying, or not at all.

From The Stranger and Sisyphus, the answer is that life is its own meaning; philosophical reflection does not give us meaning,

In Camus, only in so far as we are engaged in our lives do our lives make sense.

Ultimately I guess I been right along, life is what you make of it.

Why is there a need to psycho analyze myself? Why can’t I go about living my life the way most people do.

Why is there this reluctance to let my hair down (metaphorically speaking of course) and be part of the world. Go have fun, get drunk, and enjoy life without asking too many questions.

Why do I spend so much time and energy trying to figure out things that has no monetary value.

Why? No one really cares about my endeavors and besides like most truths we are often left unamused and if ever contend.

As long as I been able to remember I have never been able understand life. I have come to accept that none of us can even begin to comprehend our existential meaning because there hasn’t been a species like the human race in the universe that we know of.

One question remains. Why than is it important for us to know things we can’t comprehend. Shouldn’t we just forget about such things and go on to live a fruitful life? But what than is a fruitful life? And why is it so important that we should  live productive lives? Can’t I just fall in love, have a dozen kids and be some romantic poet in the French countryside without ever giving a damn about the big questions.

I already know the answer to my question, I could.

But we are a silly lot. Some us keep pushing the what-if questions until we find ourselves in uncharted territories. And guess what happens next, no one knows what is going to happen next and the whole lot of us will go through life either liberated from the past ideologies or terrified at the prospect that we have arrived at the new world without a map or a cartographer or we simply try to exploit each other by forcefully asserting ourselves in the abyss.

If hope is the only thing that gets us through a dreadful situation and things comes right for us in the end than hope is a good thing.

But what about if we go through years and years of false expectations that something might happen but never does and all of our possibilities run out and all of our chances disappear because of the expectation that was never fulfilled than hope can be a very evil thing.

I have enough of the latter happen to me so many times in the course of my life sometimes I wonder why I am still a hopeful. Perhaps I don’t want to live a life devoid of hope because if it wasn’t for hope why than would I bother waking up each and every day knowing I am destined to die.

It is the ambiguous nature of hope that makes life bearable to some and unbearable to others and just confuses the rest of us.

It’s 12:23am and I got an urge to drink coke. I went downstairs bought a can of coke from the vending machine and am sipping it as I am writing this post.

Why the sudden urge? I don’t know and I don’t care.

Why should I blog about it? Because I felt it was important.

To whom and what purpose it serves? Who gives a crap.

This is just a very short, very early-in-the-morning post to say that my grandmother is going to be discharged today, and this is the third day I am having trouble sleeping, and I am all blurry eyed now.

Why should it matter to us if we are deceived and we never know about it. Since appearance is all we have anyway.

And yet reality does seem to matter to us. Would it matter to you if your spouse or lover is unfaithful and you lived and died happily nevering knowing it?

Would you be indifferent to which world you live in whether it was so or not.

Strange creatures we are, we silly human beings.

Do monogamous mammals have this worry about their spouses?

One has to rise up out of one self to look at things objectively this way. Even be able to imagine these two worlds.

I guess this is the only way we can understand objective worth.

You might ask why do the other possible worlds matter if they are never realized. But I suggest if one was to take meta physics seriously or what great Socrates called wisdom or Sophia than unrealized worlds do matter. For there by we come to recognize objective value of things and their worth because we are creatures of fantasy, myth and storytelling.

I always wondered if it was possible to decipher the gender of an author just through his or her writing?

When I was in school I used to mark some of my friends’ English compositions and most of the time I knew who I was marking because the name was obviously written on the paper. But there were some occasions when the person writing the compositions would absent mindedly leave out their names.

Almost always I could tell whose composition it was. Perhaps it’s intuition working on a sub conscious level. I soon realized that most of the bad writing and ill imaginations were from my male counterparts plus the handwriting usually gives it away.

I have always been curious about my writing or specifically the gender it portrays. Most of the people reading my blog know who I am and this causes a bias reading. But the startling thing is 70% of my posts tend to be feminine in nature.

I can’t really validate my observations by a time tested scientific method. But there are tools in the internet that tries to guess an author’s gender based on the words he or she uses. Most my posts written in recent times seem to suggest that either I am have a feminine tone or a weak male tone to my writing.

I guess guys don’t usually talks about love, feelings and all the mushy stuff. But most of the world’s beautiful literature were indeed written by men. I guess some men are more in tuned with their feminine side that they would like to admit.

No one likes to admit such things, imagine me saying “hey guys you know I write like a girl” and that pretty much alienates you from your pals.

It not a big of a deal if you get paid good money for it but it almost always becomes gossip material.

Gender Guesser
The Gender Genie

This is the second day in a row I am unable to sleep.

The memories are keeping me awake.

It’s almost as if someone doesn’t want me to sleep.

What did I ever do to deserve such torment?

Dear God, why did you send me on a journey I wasn’t willing to take.

Oh right, you’re God and you get to do anything.

And like all journeys I am going to arrive at my destination not knowing why I took it or what purpose it served.

All I know for sure is that there is going to be a shit load of suffering, occasionally punctuated with hope so that I won’t die of despair along the way.

You won’t let me die of despair right?

Last night I couldn’t sleep. I just lay in bed thinking about everything.

Love is a complicated thing.

I really don’t know how to cure this feeling.

I seem to be drifting back to the past and thinking of people who could have shared their lives with me.

I know it is naive to believe such things could happen in this century of the self.

As Voltaire once put it sometimes I feel as though God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

I always said there were two big problems with life; Loneliness and Boredom.

Unfortunately I suffer from both. It’s not a self esteem issue; I pretty much sorted that out.

I am just bored and lonely. Not having someone to talk to on an intellectual level is pretty maddening.

The biggest problem with me is the fact I feel most human activities are a waste of time and achieves no purpose whatsoever and serves only to fill up our day so that we can go to sleep and wake up tomorrow hoping things would be better of us. We never live; we are always in the expectation of living.

In fact I don’t even know what living truly means? Do I just keep breathing until it’s time for me to die or do I do the things I really want to do without giving a thought on how it might affect the people around me or do I deny myself certain so called vices and be a law abiding citizen, be that good son, the good friend, the good brother, or do I renounce absolutes and dwell in the misty realms of morality?

If there is one animal that most resonates my attitudes I pick our feline friend.

Cats are often mistaken for being lazy because most of the time you see a cat it’s either sleeping or licking itself. The truth is the cat is an almost perfect killer. It knows it can hunt and kill small rodents to stay alive, and once it achieves its daily goal, the cat really has nothing much to do. It’s playful but I guess it’s really only trying to either stretch its legs or pass time. It’s lonely by nature and it gets to sleep around.

Sleep around, how vulgar it sounds, but actually the whole animal kingdom does it with the exception of a few worms. Like they say God created sex. Priests created marriage. And I don’t sleep around. Maybe I would, but who knows of such things.

Lots of people think their spouses would never cheat on them. But the truth is people do. Love is a funny thing, I don’t condemn these people because that’s love and since we get to die there really isn’t much incentive to be virtuous all the time. No one knows for sure what happens when we die; every religion has its own theory on what might happen. Nevertheless I don’t believe God would actually like to see us cooked in a hot stew for our vices because it serves no purpose to him.

I have many friends who are deeply religious, I do my best not to speak about religious topics to them because real people don’t deal with polemics, and they deal with feeding themselves and falling in love. They deal with surviving and trying to do the best that they can even though they don’t always know why.

So what should we do when we are bored? I don’t know what you should be doing but I seem to have a good idea on what I should be doing. It really comes down to our attitudes and our willingness to change.

I am prepared to change my career path if things become dull for me. I’m not a person who loves money or wants to keep hordes of it stashed under my bed. If I really sought money I would be in a money making profession, be a lawyer, property agent or an insurance agent. One of the main reasons why I wanted to do VFX is because there’s always something new.

It’s one of the fastest growing tech industries and I seem to be pretty decent at it. But one of the sacrifices I made is not have anyone depend on me. You might think this is selfish of me but to me self development is a higher purpose than self sacrifice.

In fact my ideal companion in life would be a career minded women who can take care of herself and really does what she wants with her life. I know there is no guarantee that we might remain true to our natures but I would do my best to encourage her. I take more pride in seeing someone succeed because of me than seeing my own success as some grand achievement.

There is no point in believing things would remain a permanent fixture in our lives. Just like a stray cat, when it’s bored with its environment it just moves on. Where it goes no one really seems to know but in this increasingly insecure world no one really gives a crap about strays.

It best you depend on yourself and do whatever you want for the moment. And once you get bored, have the courage to change and move on. If your life isn’t working do something, do anything. Move to a new city, change your profession, or fall in love with someone of another race. Just don’t sit there and brood.

There is no end to the adventures that we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open. Whether these adventures have meaning depends wholly on you. Even though I might detest many activities now, don’t be surprised if you see me doing them.

To be alive is to be able to contradict with ourselves for nothing is set in stone and everything is in motion.

But Just who am I?

I have got my work.

They say I live for my work.

I am in love with my work.

I hide in my work

Hiding from what?

From facing my failures, facing my loneliness facing the fact that I live a lie.

Yes, I live a lie and I will tell you why…

I’m always preaching not to be numb when that’s how I thrive I pretend to create and observe when I really detach from feeling alive

Perhaps it’s because…

Poor baby!

For someone who longs for a community of his own, who’s with his camera, alone?