After Forever – 5

Is it ok to expect things in a meaningless world? Is it fair to expect outcomes that are commensurate with inputs into a system? If I subscribe to the views of the European existentialists of the mid-twentieth century, subscribe to the intersection of their different but related views  – and it appears to me that I do – I would likely have no choice but to conclude that such expectations are futile. That if, in the grand scheme of things, life is devoid of meaning, then in a microcosmic sense, the same is true. That if capital L Life is meaningless, then so is small l life. 

If that is true, and to me it appears to be true, then what am I to make of having expectations? To expect, it’s clear to me, is human. And if life is inherently without meaning, then outcomes are also likely, it would appear to me, to at best only be weakly correlated to actions. This follows logically: a world where actions and outcomes have a strong causal link would be a world in which there is a clear set of axioms by which to live in order to build a life of success, irrespective of how it might be defined. And in such a causal world, differing definitions of success would compete in a free market of ideas until one definition of success would trump others. And in such a world, it would be trivial, over time, therefore, to define a set of actions from every starting point, to come as close as is humanly possible to an optimal level of success. This would be one’s incontrovertible sense of meaning. Small l life would therefore not be devoid of meaning, and consequently, capital L Life would also find meaning in this pursuit of personal meaning. Therefore, if actions and consequences really were causally linked, life would have a clearly definable meaning. But since it does appear to me that life is lacking in inherent, essential, meaning – existence, as the existentialists might all argue, precedes essence – it must also follow that expecting just recompense for one’s actions is a fool’s game. Expectation, it would appear under this set of philosophical rules, is futile. 

Yet it would appear to be just as incontrovertible to say: to expect is human. Perhaps it follows from this paraphrased idea of Camus’s: that even if it were incontrovertibly true that life is devoid of absolute – or even personal – meaning, the pursuit of meaning, irrespective of how absurd such a pursuit is, is central to the experience of living. That the pursuit of meaning in a world in which such meaning doesn’t exist is, while absurd, the entire purpose of life. That when faced with the ultimate absurdity of life – that we find we exist without essence – the solution isn’t to give up and give in to hedonistic impulses, but to strive to define the meaning that animates one’s life. Such meaning, it’s clear within this worldview, will never be found. However, the pursuit of meaning may – absurdly – help rescue us from life’s meaninglessness. The aim, therefore, isn’t to make life meaningful, but to embrace its meaninglessness. Incrementally. Within this paradigm, man’s pursuit of meaning isn’t absurd, but defiant. To try and build correlations between action and consequence is not pointless. To expect isn’t futile + human, it is central to the experience of life. It is the absurdity of existence projected onto the self. To expect outcomes in the absence of a causal link between inputs and outcomes is an act of just as much import as the act of pursuing meaning in a life where none exists. It is the basis on which to organise life’s decisions.  

But that throws an exception that troubles me. Just because I expect to come together, and believe that about a decade into being paired, Anax and I must – logically – decide to come together, I’m not entitled to their reaching the same conclusion. It’s obvious to me that I’m not entitled to an outcome. However, isn’t it just as true that expectation is no different from entitlement? One can only expect an outcome when they believe they’re entitled to it, and such expectation is ultimately indistinguishable from entitlement. It is what separates expectation from fantasy. I don’t dream of one day coming together with Anax, like father and mother had with me. Like Anax’s parents had with them. Like millions have since the Great Stew. I expect it. Even if I don’t believe I’m entitled to harbouring such an expectation of another person, even if said person is Anax, I still harbour it. How is that distinguishable from entitlement?

The answer, perhaps, is in how one responds to disappointment, to not having one’s expectations met. 

The decision at hand is what I should do if Anax concludes they have no interest in coming together. The truth is, it wouldn’t surprise me. Even before this latest round of realisations I’ve had about the incompatibility of their world view with adding more life to the world, we’ve known they experience friction with the question. In one of their lesser known essays, the Paradox of Reproduction, written a few years after graduation, Anax grapples with this idea. It is not a new question, they write. If we truly believe consciousness is more bane than boon, is it fair for us to choose to generate consciousness without the explicit consent of said consciousness? Pessimistic philosophers have asked themselves this question for millenia. Artists have struggled with it too. Perhaps the most poignant expression of this question is in the first season of the early twenty-first century television show, True Detective, in which Matthew McConaughey’s Rust Cohle paraphrases Thomas Ligotti’s Conspiracy Against The Human Race, saying, “I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in human evolution. We became too self aware; nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labo[u]r under the illusion of having a self, a secretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody’s nobody.” Here, now, I remember our conversations about this essay in the aftermath of its publication. I worried Anax would off themselves, simply put. Several old decommissioning units had found their way out into what were now referred to as deprod centres. It’s against the treaties to use them, but people still do. Suicide, while statistically far less common in a world with no scarcity, is still an option humans take. It’s a mystery scientific advancement has not yet been able to solve. 

Our conversations in the aftermath of Anax’s publishing of this essay were among our least abstract. I asked them concretely, do I need to worry about you? Would you like us to find some help for you? They said there was no reason to worry. That it was all good. That they had all the help they needed in the form of our pairing. I told them, for the first time, that I loved them. I intend on seeing this through with you. They said they loved me too. That they felt the same way. That they intended to see this through too. While our conversations did touch upon one day, in future, coming together, about reprod centres and docs and new life and parenting, we both concluded we had little interest in those things. My interest, I had said, is you. Nothing else matters to me. They had agreed, said they felt the same way. Years later, here, now, I think back to our conversations about that essay and I remember my concern for Anax obscured an instinct that has now returned for the first time since – self-preservation. Did I need to worry for myself, I wondered. Was I plunging myself headlong into something that was wrong for me? That was bad for me? Today, the feeling returns.

Back then, I swatted away the thought of maybe needing to protect myself, believed myself to be selfish, drew focus towards what I believed was of more importance in the moment – Anax’s sense of fulfilment. Maybe, I thought, it was I that most contributed to the lack of fulfilment they felt. Intellectually, I was no match to them. I continue to be no match; if anything, the intellectual gap between us has only grown since. Maybe that’s the source of their lack of fulfilment, I still think. Compassion makes us generalise statements that are simultaneously specific and unkind. Rather than saying, I believe I’m unhappy with you, we say, I believe I’m unhappy. Rather than saying, I believe my life, as it stands today, lacks a sense of purpose, we say, I believe life lacks a sense of purpose. Rather than saying, I believe you’re intellectually overbearing and that suppresses my ability to express myself freely, we say, I’m becoming more introverted with age. It’s the sort of obscuring human beings have to do in order to be functioning members of society. Maybe Anax’s diatribes against existence have very little to do with existence in general, and much more to do with their existence. Their life. The life they’ve shared, for a decade, with me. 

Today old feelings return. I wonder if I asked the wrong question altogether the last time I felt this way. Rather than asking if the Paradox of Reproduction was about Anax’s feelings of fulfilment and fear, maybe it would be more appropriate to ask if the Paradox of Reproduction is about my feelings of fulfilment and fear. How do I feel about coming together with Anax if their view of the world is so jaundiced? The decision at hand isn’t if we need to come together. It is if I should even consider coming together with Anax, especially now that I know how the quote from that television show ends, a quote that appears to be deliberately excluded from Anax’s essay. I think the hono[u]rable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.

A raw deal. So much of Anax’s writing grapples with the idea that our regenerated consciousnesses are a raw deal. That, in the absence of a body, what it means to live, what it means to be alive, is deserving of infinite pathos. That, in truth, the experience of life is a drive to the inevitable constant reexamination of its own meaning. Whether it’s its purpose or otherwise is not how Anax frames it. They frame it as an inevitability. That we are so defined by our lack of a body that constant reexamination is the only road we can take. It isn’t a question of choice, as far as they are concerned. As they had once told me, reexamining the meaning of life is as inevitable to us as gravity must have been to bodied humans. What else is there to do? 

I often wonder what else there is to do. It isn’t lost on me that at no point in the history of human society has the major profession among humans been thinking. Never have there been more thinkers than there are today. Perhaps it was inevitable in a world with no scarcity, and virtually no energy needs. Endowed with existence and time, humans would inevitably cultivate their curiosity, then filter what they discovered through the prism of consciousness, then finally share the result with other humans, who would absorb the resulting thoughts as elements of ‘the world around them’, filter them through the prism of their own consciousness, and repeat. Humans were born to be thinkers, some might argue, and now, at the end of history, that’s what humans have become. In the absence of a body, maybe we’ve finally assumed form. It’s probably true, Anax’s view, that there’s a certain inevitability to what we’ve wound up becoming. That near-infinite, ceaseless thinking was inevitably where we’d land; that we had no choice in the matter. That if we had fists, we’d shake them at the sky and curse the abyss that stared back at us. It’s probably true that this, the final form of the human, is a pathetic form, capable of so much, while also being capable of so little. Limitless in theory, entirely limited in form and function. It’s probably true that the only logical way in which to react to the contemporary human condition is with sympathy. 

But I wonder if that’s how I would like to react to it. Somewhere between father’s wide-eyed worship of what it means to be human and Anax’s disdain for all that it means to be human lies a measured view of the world. One that is less preoccupied with humanness and more concerned with being. After all, isn't the question of what it means to be human primarily a semantic one? So what if I conclude one way or another? Does it really answer the question of how I must act? How one must act? Having been endowed with consciousness, be it boon or bane, what must I do with it? That is the question. And that question has little to do with what it means to be human. The decision at hand isn’t a decision about what it means to be human. The decision at hand is fairly simple – should Anax and I come together? Should a new consciousness be formed – a mostly randomised average of the two of us? Given what I know of them and what I know of myself, should I elect to come together with them? It’s easier to rest this decision on convincing them of what I believe I see – that, logically, the two of us should come together. After all, Anika and Raji made the decision within two years of getting paired. And the Jays, well they seemingly knew immediately. Out of respect for social convention, they waited half a year. Maybe, Jay 1 had said two months into their pairing, there’s something to be said about following convention. We were speaking in private, and Jay 1, it appeared, needed someone to convince her that she was rushing into things; so she came to me. But I knew two months ago. I knew the moment we met. I argued caution. Argued the value of getting to know someone better before making the decision. There’s a reason it’s called the Promise Wing, I had said. Six months, she had responded. That’s how long I’m willing to wait. In comparison, ten years seems absurd. 

Or maybe we never come together. We don’t have to. Maybe two is plenty, and adding a new consciousness to the mix is likely to complicate things. Like father said, when you entered the picture, you were always part of the equation of life. Do I want to add a new consciousness to the equation of life? There doesn’t seem to be much need for it. After all, the moment I think of the decision at hand in a way that’s concrete, not abstract, it makes me uncomfortable. It’s easier to think of the decision as a philosophical one. As the outcome of a generalisable set of principles of which Anax and I are just vehicles. But the moment I express the decision at hand as the concrete question it is, even if only to myself, I find myself needing to evade the question, express it as an abstraction, drain all realness from it. The decision at hand is – do I want to come together with Anax?

• Do: framing the question as a form of active choice poses the first real challenge. For so long I have assumed the decision as a matter of social convention. Ten years, I have repeated, as if to drain the rest of the question of significance. In framing the question as one that starts with the word ‘should’, rather than the word ‘do’, I have robbed myself and Anax of agency. As if the most important questions in life are a matter of social convention and not a matter of personal choice. As if we aren’t individuals, but two atoms in a sequence. It’s one of father’s lasting legacies, this erroneous framing of the question. When framed as a deliberate choice to be made by two individual humans, it’s a question I find hard to answer.

• I: stripping away questions of humanness from the question poses the next challenge. For all my complaints about Anax’s and father’s preoccupations with what it means to be human, I am just as guilty, if not more so, of enveloping myself in the question in order to shy away from taking responsibility for my actions. Of using uncertainty as a force field of sorts to avoid grappling with real questions. It’s easier to deal in abstractions when one is uncertain. Uncertainty allows for indefinite inaction, certainty necessitates definite action. I allow myself uncertainty so as to not answer the question.

• Want to: I do so to avoid expressing desire. If I want nothing, I can never be disappointed. Life goes on. Desire leaves in its wake all sorts of painful outcomes. Abstraction, ultimately, is the act of the coward. 

• Come together: not for a second do I consider the fate of this new consciousness. If we are to believe that we are human, this new ‘life’ will be equipped with all the internal machinations that have allowed me to get to the point in life when I’m faced with this decision. Should this new life come to a world with Anax and myself as their parents? Two humans so incapable of having a real conversation about each other or themselves without making it into an abstract conversation about nothing and nobody? Is it fair for a new life to be brought into a world that’s already rife with questions, starting with the most elementary one – what does it mean to be human – in a home that’s populated by two humans who appear to be so fundamentally lost on the question? Two humans who are especially skilled at burying even the simplest question in additional layers of complexity, reframing even the simplest of situations as an existential dilemma. 

• With: Each of the previous questions arises in a world where I’m yet to ask myself if I even want to be paired with Anax in the first place. I have spent the last decade so keenly obsessed with proving myself worthy of being paired with a ‘great thinker’ like Anax that I haven’t bothered asking myself whether I want to be paired with them in the first place. If father is to be believed, the purpose of pairing is fulfilment of the soul. It’s a point of view with which I have never engaged because it’s tough to believe we have souls, given there are no bodies within which to contain them. But if I were to take his view, would I claim to have a soul that is fulfilled? If I were to take the view of the Jays, I would hold on to an even more romantic ideal of what it means to be paired. It’s an ideal to which this pairing has never lived up. But maybe that’s too high a bar; who’s to say? But wouldn’t it also be fair to say that over the course of the ten years Anax and I have been together, I have found myself increasingly downplaying my needs versus theirs? Is that not a severely unhealthy dynamic to perpetuate? Isn’t that the first thing on which to focus, before further complicating it with a consciousness that father says will always be part of the equation? Is this an equation even worth preserving?

• Anax: and I don’t think I even like being around Anax anymore. Not as humans should. I like being around Anax like I like being around a good book. But I don’t like how they make me feel. I don’t like having to constantly question what it means to be human; it feels like such a waste of limited time. The occasional animated debate, sure. But to be constantly in the thick of a lively argument against the fabric of existence? It’s exhausting. If I’m truthful to myself, it has been exhausting for years. Ever since their career as an essayist took off, it has been a little exhausting – to digest polemic after polemic. 

When framed correctly, the decision at hand is actually fairly simple. Knowing what I know, I agree with Anax. We shouldn’t come together. We shouldn’t even be together.