What do you live for?
I won't pretend to be the only person to think I have asked this, as almost every teenager in existence has asked it. The answer is likely simple for most people. I live because not to would cause untold suffering to all those around me.
It's simple question I don't have an answer to. Do you think I'd have an answer, after thousands of years of Philosophers pontificating, debating and propagandising? Of course not, I live because I must, but lets point the abstractions out.
The first is that of a higher power. You live not for an afterlife, but to serve some higher power or some higher purpose which is all well and good. Just don't consider the possibility that higher power is malign and malicious. But finding that higher purpose plugs into the same question of what is that higher purpose? You only have the texts written by deeply flawed authors long dead, men of the flesh like you and I. "If we have no higher purpose, then what is the point?"
The second is the allure of the afterlife, regardless of what afterlife reincarnation, eternal life, immortality of the soul, heaven, hell and Limbo or just suckling as a Vampire. Whatever afterlife, it mandates good conduct in line with the precepts of your religion, and your deeply flawed human interpretations of yourself or the same trust in men of the cloth to wax lyrical of what conduct is needed. To appropriate a word of Stirner's this belies a spook, an abstract concept with no basis in reality. You live to avoid sin, of which you cannot demonstrate, to be rewarded with the afterlife you cannot demonstrate in order to avoid eternal torment you cannot demonstrate for the good grace of God, both of which you cannot demonstrate.
Then there is another case, the will to dominate, the will steered by ambition and Human Hubris to conquer; so that your actions go down in history and all those generations after you have your name on their lips and with bated breath say: "He was the man who completed his Funko Pop Collection!". I know it is trite to say this as Neil deGrasse Tyson and Rick and Morty have made it their only comedy material to repeat that it is Human Hubris to think you mean anything in the wider context, by zooming out a little bit to the cosmic scale and articulating how meaningless and insignificant you are. It truly demonstrates the inconsequential nature of accomplishment but to hell with it many try to accomplish this. Do you think you are immortal to the second death, when your name will never be uttered again, after your gravestone liquefies and your bones melt under nuclear hellfire?
But I do not say any of this to sneer at the faithful or the ambitious. You'll observe I have said all of this scrutinising their beliefs, but making no moral judgement of it because... Who am I to make a moral judgement of the faithful? I live because I must. I have been approaching this all from a secular angle as I consider myself to be a non-theist- which I have to derail on a tanget to talk about Atheism as they speak with the same fervour in total belief of the absence, as opposed to the absence of belief of a non-theist.
These Atheists betray themselves as one of The Hollow Faithless. Hollow in their soul as they are Hollow in their skull. It would be reductionist to say all the Hollow Faithless are Atheists, as they even exist among men of the cloth. Consider the ultimate punishment is ETERNAL TORMENT, yet despite this it is not enough to stop some committing Mortal Sin which is defined under Catholocism which I have stolen without questioning of the eternal editor wars of the Leftist front of Wikipedia as being met by the following conditions:
- Its subject matter must be grave. (The term "grave sin" is used at times to indicate grave matter, and at times to indicate mortal sin. But it always remains true that the following two conditions are requisite for mortal sin.)
- It must be committed with full knowledge (and awareness) of the sinful action and the gravity of the offense.
- It must be committed with deliberate and complete consent.
It goes without saying, that a great many Catholics, imperfect in their mind as imperfect are their binds go in complete denial of this, disobeying the law of God in favour of what. Chasing the Dragon? Do I need to echo a million self-help Gurus to reiterate that getting it off until all that remains is the bloody meat stump from suicidal autoerotic asphyxiation probably isn't good for you? It goes without saying this wilful hedonism presents the first of the Hollow Faithless. The CONSOOMER, who will repeatedly open his wallet on the next purchase repeating the mantra that his ideology of choice will justify and idealise; a modern 21st century ideal of individualism, or collectivism. Equality in consumption or selfish gorging upon the endless tap of 0s and 1s.
Then there is a second kind, the desperate who will follow relentlessly some golden or shit-stained idol, a zealous paragon of empty ideals which will be sold for exactly £299 and you can get it with 1 day delivery from Amazon Crime. These are those left without a mentor to guide them to a rockbottom set of unbreakable morals at the bottom of a Beer. Those without a religion who will follow any cult to substitute, even the true religious cult of the organised religion of Ned Flander's kid diddlers to the bottom of the cliff of Mothers who spout "If all your friends jumped off a cliff would you follow them?".
The worst of these are those who have made science their cult. It is a factual statistic that 99% of all science is wrong, as the science of the institute of barf by professor bean has demonstrated clearly in a 3 month research paper. The science is clear that basing your entire ideology on something mutable by definition is flawed. It is so easy to forget that it was once good science to say your humours are out of balance, that you must let this leech suck all the bloody zealotry from your body, and do no scrutiny upon this science for it must be unquestioned, just as the headlines of new science propagandised by the media for the blank stares of faked emotional drones to use to defenestrate those who would dare question and conspire in the mushroom circle of flat earth theory. To have made a religion out of science, it is an absolute travesty to have seen this become the substitution given form by the fedora touting atheist with neckbearded abandon.
So at the end of all this, what do I live for? Unceremoniously, I will say I do not know with any precision worthwhile. It used to be as a teenager I was enthusiastic about games development but one of the seven deadly sins, Sloth has left me with apathy- and I bitterly see what games do to people, myself and those I respect; turned into automatons. All this isn't to say there aren't games which touch the soul, as among them I can count games that have affected me: Hyper Light Drifter, Myst, Cruelty Squad and Candy Crush are among them. Similarly in movies, Blade Runner, Casablanca and Sex and the City 2. I live because I must, and that must leaves among the Hollow Faithless who turns to contentment and not fulfilment, even as much as I see it as important, but in this respect I acknowledge the cosmic insignificance of it all and deem it irrelevant because it's not within my sphere of influence. Affecting those within my sphere of influence is a much more worthwhile goal even if this asks for simplicity in living. I have considered many different philosophies that tend to this goal. Nietzsche's Ubermensch, Stirner's Egoism, Marcus' Stoicism, Kaczynski's log cabinism, Joe Biden's Dementia; they all seem to point towards simplicity in living as the best method of living. Sometimes, when you fill a vacuum it still sucks.
At the end of it all, it would be a tragedy to be left wanting.