Last time, I took a look at the case to be made for how life is a joke.
And the taking of everything very seriously, and putting all our earnest effort into making money and finding happiness and all these kind of concerns: there’s something kind of silly about it.
And so there is a case to be made that we really should just see it as a joke.
And I think that this is partially true.
But it’s not completely true.
So now I’m going to look at the other side of this question.
What is it that makes life not a complete joke? Well, you know, if you really, really zoom out, you can say OK, we’re just dots on a ball that live for a short time, and there’s no reason to be concerned about anything.
And that may be true.
But when it comes to our real lives, there are things that actually matter.
Now, when we zoom out, we can say it doesn’t matter.
But it still matters.
Would you rather live a life with love and connection and satisfying work and joy experiencing the world? Or would you rather live a life of imprisoned, tortured anxiety and doubt and suffering and anything that we could describe as suffering, as hell on earth? I mean, there is a difference there.
Even when we zoom out all the way, it’s still the same, you’re still a little dot on a ball that is only around for a short time, and anything you do eventually, you know, it’s really temporary.
Still, it still matters.
The pure joke mentality takes it to a level where nothing matters.
Nothing matters at all.
So if life really is entirely a joke, it’s almost like we’re not allowing anything to matter.
We’re just saying it’s all a joke.
And even though that can be useful, that’s a useful tool so that we don’t take ourselves too seriously, it’s a useful tool to loosen up and see the funny kind of pointless side of things, that you know, we’re all just little drops in a big ocean, and we shouldn’t get too concerned about these little things, but these things can still matter.
Because we’d still rather see ourselves and the people we love have happy lives, whatever that means, rather than lives of suffering, or death.
So as long as something matters to us, then it’s not a pure joke.
It’s not like “Ha ha, I killed you.
Ha ha.
Well, it’s all part of the universal comedy.
Ha ha.” I mean, as long as we still have these feelings and attachments, we can’t see things as a pure joke, because it actually makes a difference to us, you know, whether something is one way or the other.
So it’s like there’s this philosophical level where we can take everything as a joke, but when it comes to real life, we still can’t entirely get away from a sense of certain outcomes being better than others, certain circumstances being better than others.
And when somebody comes along with just a pure joke mentality, it’s almost like dismissing this.
It’s just like almost being numb to it, that it’s just like “Meh, whatever.” And maybe in order to have that, this person has to either be so beset by suffering that they’re transcending it through humour, which can be a very powerful way to transcend our suffering, or somebody who is not particularly suffering and is not particularly attuned to it, and just sees the general humour of it all.
Sometimes I see like as much as it’s wonderful to laugh and to find comedy, I always find there’s a limit to comedy.
It can’t be 100% of how I see things.
It eventually reaches the point where it’s sort of looking for anything to laugh about: it almost loses touch with reality, with real concerns, and it becomes just looking for anything that can trigger a laugh, no matter what.
I don’t what the limit of comedy is.
The limit of comedy may be very high.
I don’t know.
It may even be 90%.
That’s what I don’t know.
I don’t know what is the proportion of life that we can make comedy? I’m just pretty sure it’s not 100%, that we can’t life be a pure joke.
But I would love to hear your feedback of how you look at this.
How much of life is a joke, from 0 to 100? I’m going to have to go somewhere- I’ll just have to say 50%, because I don’t know.
But it could be maybe only 10%, if you know, life is mostly serious, but we have some laughs.
Or it could be 90%, that you know, life’s almost all a joke, but there’s still some things that we take seriously.
So where do you fall in this spectrum?
#lifeisnotajoke #islifeajoke #notajoke