How serious is life? Is life a joke? Is life no joke? Somewhere in between? This is a question that I am still looking into, looking for the answer to.
I don’t know where to place life on this scale.
So what I would then do is just look at the scale itself.
What is this continuum that we can look at for placing life itself? How silly and funny versus serious is life? So OK, we can just try to start at the the funny end.
Why not? Life’s a joke.
None of it matters.
The best thing we can do is laugh.
Now, there’s a lot to make this case.
There’s a lot to support this view.
I mean, when we look at everything that we work on, it’s all temporary.
We build a life, and we die.
Even if we leave a legacy of family behind, eventually they all die.
Eventually the world will pass.
Anything that we do- I mean, almost everything we do is very temporary, and even the things that are more permanent still are not really permanent.
And so there’s something, there’s so many things, that are very funny about life.
And especially funny when you see people taking things very seriously.
It’s like, well, don’t they know that you’re making a big fuss over something that is very short-lived, something that will go away? And you know, that’s something that I always find that that’s one of the funniest things, is when you see people who are being very, very serious while doing things that are very silly.
You know, like somebody may be dressed up in a chicken suit, and he’s trying to give a serious lecture about, you know, philosophy or politics or business or something, trying to be very serious, taking himself very seriously, but he’s wearing a chicken suit.
That to me is funny.
And that seems like in some way what life is.
If we’re so serious about these things like making money and trying to find happiness in life, and then we get to the end of life, and it’s all over.
And well, you know, so much I can look back on my life, and it’s like we’re all concerned with all these things in our daily business, our day-to-day concerns in professional and personal life.
All these concerns are filling our mind about things that are important, and then as we get older and they pass, then it kind of feels like, well, that was a lot of fuss about nothing.
I was so worried about making that money, and now I’ve spent all the money.
I was so worried about some particular personal relationship, now long gone.
And so there’s just this sense that we put so much energy into very seriously trying to achieve certain things and avoid other things, and there’s something that is just kind of silly about it, if we can just have that perspective that it all passes, from that kind of- if you really, really zoom out, and you can picture we’re like little dots on the surface of the ball, as you imagine really, really zooming out on what the whole earth is, and when we have that kind of big picture in mind, and then you have somebody worried about some little day-to-day thing, it’s like, well, what are you worried about? Like that’s kind of silly and funny to put so much energy into something that is completely just so temporary and frivolous.
It’s like being worried about like somebody who’s very concerned with a certain cloud forming in the sky, and it’s very important that the cloud has a correct shape, and then they’re very worried about how the cloud is changing shape, and then the cloud disappears.
Or somebody who is just worried about the sun, like “The sun’s gonna go down.
Oh my God, the sun’s gonna go down.” And treating that one day as if that’s everything.
It’s so important.
That’s kind of like what we do.
By zooming in, focusing on individual problems that we have to deal with, if we let those become too dominant in our minds, we lose sight of the bigger picture.
Then it seems like making a lot of fuss out of nothing.
So from that perspective it seems like there is a case to be made that really, life is kind of a joke.
And it can be useful to bring a bit of that perspective back to stop ourselves from taking too seriously and totally things that are, when we zoom out, very small.
But of course, there’s another side to the story, and I’ll look at that next time.
#lifesajoke #islifeajoke #peoplearesilly