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• Why Does It Feel Like Nothing Is Fun Anymore?

I light up my cigar, pour a scotch - and watch the raging "Fire in Paradise" - 50 x 30 Cm

The "West Atlas" jackup oil rig, owned and operated by Seadrill Corp. - located in the Timor Sea between Australia and Indonesia. November - 2009

Why Does It Feel Like Nothing Is Fun Anymore?

A tire that's flat.
A disease. A desire.
Fears in front of you. Fears that hold so still you could study them like pieces on a chessboard.
It's not the large things that send a person to the mad house.

Death he's ready for, or murder. Robbery. Fire. Flood?
No.
It's the continuing series of small tragedies that send a person to the mad house.

Not the death of a love - but a shoelace that snaps with no time left.
“The dread of life is that swarm of trivialities that can kill quicker than cancer and which are always there”  – Charles Bowski.

At some point - for most of us - knowingly or unknowingly, we become someone whom we said we would never be.
We reached that age in form that didn't seem real or possible as a child.
Soon we barely even remember that child.
They become a distant stranger. Their form now seeming impossible. Their playfulness, joyfulness and innocence is reduced by bitterness, frustration and cynicism.

Of Course, We Cannot Conquer Time and Age

They are invincible opponents who beat on us our entire lives - waiting to take us whenever they wish.

But we can perhaps conquer ourselves. We can fight our way back to, at least aspects of that childlike nature we once knew.
To degrees of that joy and light-heartedness.

So much of our anger, bitterness cynicism, loss of joy and playfulness and so on - is understandable.

At an early age we were told, or at least given the impression, that the justification for our existence for love and acceptance, was contingent on our success and achievements.

Our ability to live and act certain ways. And so - most of us accepted this offer. We sacrificed our light-heartedness and joyfulness, and we began on our journey toward the so-called Promised Land of achievement, and solemnity.

Along the way we encountered countless other people on their own passage, who too, had traded large amounts of their joy and play.
Some of these people were awful to us - in both small and big ways.
By intention or by accident, we were repeatedly screwed over or mistreated by people and circumstances.

We began to realize how terribly unfair and unbalanced the world is.
We began to despise things and people we didn't even know or understand. We learned to become hard shelled to protect against the incoming debris.

And Then, At Some Stage . . .

And we learned to be forceful and disagreeable. To continue forward then, finally, regardless of whether we became particularly successful or not. We found, or will find, that the joy and playfulness we sacrificed does not necessarily await Us in Greater form at the end of it all.

Instead, the majority of what awaits us is a pile of trivialities and annoyances, amounting to exhaustion cynicism and apparent futility. Of course - there's plenty of room in this pile for a sense of purpose, pride and achievement.

But how many of us really find, or require these things along the way? And for the lucky ones amongst us who do - how many of us acquire them free of great sacrifices that don't ultimately equate to the same sort of hard-shelled numbness?

In the words of the great German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer:
“A man is never happy but spends his whole life in striving after something that he thinks will make him so. He seldom attains his goal and when he does - it is only to be disappointed.
He's mostly Shipwrecked in the end, and comes into harbour with mast and rigging gone. And then it is all one - whether he is happy or miserable - for his life was never anything more than a present moment - always Vanishing”.

And now it is over, so much of our anger bitterness cynicism and loss of joy and playfulness is not solely because of the conditions of our life, but rather the conditions of our perception.
Our expectations and desires. Our cynicism anger and bitterness can often find their origins in a strange and paradoxical place: >>>

Optimism and Hope

Our negative responses are often partly the result of a terribly misguided and false belief that we likely formed and sustained in youth.
The belief that life will always feel the same as it once did. That it will always be light and filled with the helium of party balloons.

That those Dreadful adults were wrong, that we would never, and could never be like that dreary old man next to us on the train, who scoffed at our loud laughter. That woman who frantically screeched at usfor goofing around in the convenience store. Or that man who nastily yelled at us to stop skateboarding on The Ledges.

But with this belief we took and drove the same stake of optimism through our hearts, that those individuals once did.
Over time as the days began to rush by, and we saw more and more things go wrong we asked more and more questions we didn't know the answers to, and were required to do more and more stuff we didn't want, with little to no reprieve.

At least on an unconscious level we likely began to understand those loathsome individuals.
Perhaps we began to share sensibilities with them. Perhaps if we were not careful, we became or will become one of them ourselves.

For when the smack of age and time and the compounding tedium of adulthood hits us - if we are not ready, able to block, evade or handle it, it can knock us out completely.
Somewhat paradoxically, an effective way we can reduce the intensity with which we might come to experience bitterness and stupor in life, is to let go of our optimism. That particular form of optimism that has us still thinking that if we do all the right things in all the right ways, life will be resolvable; he trivialities and tragedies will subside, and we will find childlike Joy again.

Give It Up. Let Go En-Joy

That joy in fact, comes from in large part, giving up on this ideal.
It comes from letting go and accepting what is inevitable and uncontrollable.
It is the lesson taught by so many of the most potent and enduring philosophies from Dosm to
Stoicism to Buddhism to Philosophical Pessimism: he who wishes to take control of the world, and acts upon it I can see that he will not succeed, for the world is a Divine vessel.

“It cannot be acted upon as one wish. He who acts on it fails - he who holds on to it loses”, wrote Lao Tzu in the fundamental Taoist text, the Tao Te Ching.
The French philosopher, Albert Camus famously coined the term the “Absurd” when referring to the nature of Humanity's relationship with the world. For Camus, Humanity is embedded with the insatiable need for ultimate meaning and yet the Universe seems to lack any provisions for this meaning wrote “man stands face to face with the irrational he feels within him, his longing for happiness, and for reason the Absurd is born”.

Of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable Silence of the world neither mankind nor the universe is absurd in itself, but the absurdity is born of the relationship between them.

Likewise, slightly extending the scope of this idea, this also applies to the impulse for ultimate control and joy met with the inability to control much of anything, and a life filled with frustrations confusions and disappointments.

But Life is not frustrating or cruel or disappointing on its own.
The frustration and disappointment are born of the confrontation between our expectations and reality.
We can change what we experience by changing how we see and consider things.

Camus goes on to argue that although The Human Condition is absurd, the Absurd can nonetheless still be filled with passion and Beauty if we choose to see it that way.

The mundane can be potent and beautiful even the so-called annoying and bad can be potent and beautiful. I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things Then I shall be one of those who makes things beautiful. I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse. I do not even want to accuse those who accuse looking away, shall be my only negation.

“And all in all and on the whole, someday, I wish to be only a yes-sayer”, wrote the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

Of course it's equally important to note and recognize that negative responses to the world like anger frustration or even bitterness and cynicism, are not always bad. They are not only understandable, but they can often be reasonable and healthy.

We should be upset when things go wrong that we could have prevented.
We should be defiant and assertive when someone crosses our boundaries, or tries to take advantage of us.

We should be cautious and sceptical of things and people and, of course, we should take the responsibilities of our life seriously - and we should have goals and aspirations when working to let go a bit more in life.

We shouldn't throw our hands up with utter indifference - but rather loosen up our grip. Or perhaps better - simply reconsider the meaning of our grip. That is how serious everything we are clinging to ultimately is.

Or isn't.

In The End - We All Fall into Oblivion

Along with all that we cling to, our grips released for us. And so what's important is that in the process of trying to protect ourselves in this world, we don't go so far that we lose ourselves to this world while we are still here.

We don't have to become the person we never wanted to be. We can realize that things are complicated, and hard, and tragic, and tedious - but that we could still experience joy and playfulness, nonetheless.

We can still see things with fresh, curious and excited eyes.
And we can accept the “Absurd” and uncontrollable nature of everything.
And we can laugh instead of scoff

One of the most important things we can do in life is better understand and gain control over how we think. To have more say over what we experience.
We must work to make some amount of our unconscious thought patterns conscious.

Of course this can be extremely difficult.

But with the right tools, time and effort - it gets easier.

Get Creative

To stir your creativity, coax out your personal values and promote new ways of thinking that might otherwise be hard to arrive at for example:
Write your obituary.

This is intended to challenge you to consider yourself from a different vantage point.

In this case after you're gone.

Almost tricking yourself into uncovering what truly matters to you.

When all is said and done - it gets YOU  out of the way so that you can better see.

FUCKIT! >> Thank God Its Friday