Taking out the Trash

Mom: Tayler, you need to take out the trash.

Me: Why?

Mom: Because, it’s almost spilling out onto the floor.

Me: No, no, I mean why? What is the purpose of doing that? Why do we do anything at all?

Mom: What are you talking about? We need to empty the trash cans so we can throw more things away tomorrow. Makes sense to me.

Me: But I’m going to die someday. Whether or not I take out the trash does not change this fact. And when I do die, everything I did in life becomes meaningless.

Mom: Not so! Life is rich, beautiful, and full of meaning. Plus, imagine the difference you can make for the world after you’re gone. Sort of immortalizes you in a sense. Isn’t that amazing to think about?

Me: Oh mom, I already have thought about it. What’s more, I thought about it in deeper and deeper ways until I had considered every possibility. Ultimately, I recently reached the conclusion that “meaning” and “purpose” aren’t even real! They are just illusions of a man’s mind. So are ideas like good vs. evil, and all other concepts rooted in social constructs.

Mom: Well, that’s certainly an unsettling conclusion. I don’t think I can agree with you, though. You seem to have a really skewed view on reality.

Me: But Mom, when you stand back, and look at the world in an objective sense, you realize just how cold and meaningless everything is.

Mom: Wow! You’ve become a Nihilist on me? My goodness, I had hoped that you would have thought about your ideas in a grander sense. Your scope of reason is very narrow and all too analytical.

Me: But I…um, how do you mean?

Mom: Well…yes, a deep understanding of objective existence does in fact affirm your nihilistic suspicions. But what you have not considered is that objective reality is not where we are right now. We are in our own subjective reality. And within this reality, there very well can exist valid concepts of meaning and purpose and good vs. evil. These are all ideas that you create in your world, but just because you made them doesn’t mean they aren’t “real”. They are real to us all. They are the inspirations that derive meaning and purpose from life.

Me: Well…ok, yeah. I see your point, but it sounds to me like you are professing the need for accepting delusions in order to be ignorantly happy for the duration of our lives. We can tell ourselves what you just told me, but when we die, our subjective reality is annihilated, and it all falls down to what is real at the lowest level of existence—objective reality. So, again I argue that when we die, there is no more meaning, purpose, or continuity of existence for me.

Mom: How do you know that last bit to be true? What makes you so sure that there is an end to “being” in the face of death? Maybe we live on in some way. Maybe there is some essential entity of our being that lives beyond our physical husk.

Me: You mean the soul? Please, mom. I thought you were intelligent enough to see beyond the falsities of religion. I will never believe that the son of “God” walked the earth a couple thousand years ago, and I will especially never believe in some sort of Deity chillin’ up in the clouds watching over us. So I definitely don’t believe that when we die, we have a “soul” that leaves our body and goes to heaven or hell, or whatever.

Mom: Well, geez. I hit upon a touchy topic.

Me: Yeah, sorry…I just get fed up with people believing things without evidence or any means of verification and only because their parents or culture try to make them.

Mom: Well, you have a point there. I definitely understand why that frustrates you. But unfortunately, you seem to have been too biased against organized religion to consider some very interesting facets of its premise.

Me: Like what?

Mom: Well for starters, you need to consider that anything really is possible. There is so much about the world we don’t know, so much about existence and consciousness we’ve yet to understand. I do not doubt the possibility of supernatural occurrences or seemingly “religious” ideas. These are entirely possible, despite our current inability to verify them. If they are true, then I simply don’t believe them to be “religious”.

Me: Well then what are they?

Mom: Science. If there is a religion out there that is true, then it can all be explained by science. Just because we haven’t discovered something amazing doesn’t mean that it is “super-natural”. We humans have a nasty tendency to refute claims of discoveries about the world. We called some of the most pioneering scientists in history insane, before we came to realize their correctness. We know so little about the world, but think we know everything. Just keep your mind open.

Me: Wow, you really have a point there. I guess there is a lot we just don’t know. The possibilities truly are endless, aren’t they?

Mom: Yes, they are. And as you continue to develop your worldly knowledge and experience, your insight and intuition will follow, revealing to you an even greater understanding of your place in the universe. And if we ever do discover the nature of our existence, I think the answers we find will be something more amazing and beautiful than you could ever imagine. So go forth and live your life to the fullest, and always leave your mind open to the possibilities!

And with that I began my journey.

Notes:

I began writing this work in a word document at 12 pm, on my lunch break from work. I was thinking about that scene in family guy where Peter refers to an ancestor of his who was a “great Philosopher”, and then it went off to depict the man in a cut-scene. He was sitting in a small wooden chair in the middle of a ratty-looking, unfurnished living room, gazing pensively off at nothing, seemingly contemplating his existence with a look of minor frustration on his face. His wife walks in carrying an infant in her arms and says, “Thomas, would you please go look for a job?” He replies with a drawn out, unamused, and contemplative “Why?” while putting a hand out in the air, and without straying from his fixed gaze. I found this scene to be a very amusing spoof on philosophy, and wanted to make my own spoof on it. Unfortunately, once I got to the fourth line in this document I could already see what I was going to do, and it wasn’t a humor piece. It was what you just read. This is one of those documents I would never share with anyone, but because I have a blog, and no one reads it anyway (and I do mean no one, as of 11/17/11; I check the view counts), I figured I might as well put it up here.