Existence

As a teen, I got really into philosophy. I spent a good amount of money on big books by Kant, Mill and others. What I really got in to was existentialism. The dreary, French world of a world without meaning.

I didn’t get it. I ascribed a certain religious mysticism to it. Like it was some kind of magic concerning objects. That it could shoot me in to a new understanding like New Age meditation or Zen. It was supposed to save me from my position in life. Make me better.

Years have gone by since I really tried to understand it. I’ve recently taken it back up, the reasons being obvious. The books haven’t changed. The Stranger is still written by Albert Camus. Nausea is still evidence of Sartre’s love of his own written word. Only I have changed. And it is my changes that have brought me to greater understanding of what these men were trying to say.

Things are.

Objects exist devoid of meaning. They just are. It is we who give them meaning. We imbue the fork with its name, its use and its importance. Same with the book, the computer, the hat. All things are just things. Their value is totally and utterly subjective.

Meaning is utterly subjective. The Bible. The Torah. The Koran. God. Love. Wife. Sex. All of it is GIVEN meaning by us. They have no meaning on their own. There is no reason and no way one person’s meaning can ever be truly understood or adopted by another. It is impossible. Ironically, the fathers of this philosophy were mostly socialists.

To me, right now, it tells me that I am beholden to no one and nothing. That I am free. Free in the sense that the world’s meaning as preached by its leaders, its people, its jackals, has no control over me because, in reality, it has no meaning. It has no meaning because it does not exist. It does not exist because ideas, values, faith; they are not physical. They are phantoms of the subjective. They are chains from orators and mad men.

People crowd for meaning. They kill for meaning. They do things they’d never do to feel meaning. Other peoples’ meanings. Not their own. They reach for anything to make them feel alive when all that time their meaning, their own lives, are right there in them.

The only meaning that matters is your own, and only because you are the only one who can give meaning to your life and what’s in it. If you hold to meanings not your own, you are latching yourself to nothing and will feel nothing genuine. Nothing that is yours.