Disappointingly, but inevitably, every blogger, or indeed every writer, will realise they cannot be profound all of the time. Some of these people will immediately go on to become comedy writers, despite the odds against them being taller than Kilimanjaro. Some get employed, shifting the responsibility of content to higher levels of authority. Others become whores of the lowest order, copying news articles to reap traffic and Adwords clicks. Still more will yet, in the true LiveJournal fashion, tell us every detail about everything. I don't know if they carry a notepad, or just make shit up, but there's way too much detail out there. The guys over at Penny Arcade have summarised this issue perfectly, and I couldn't agree more. Some of a more noble breed use it as a sort of public scribble pad, sometimes playing with words and ideas, sometimes with stories, sometimes just sorting themselves out. And finally, there's people like me, who just write with a lot of commas and hope people won't notice that there's no content between them.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you - Clarity of Mind. Which is, incidentally, a fantastic song, of which you'll find a Youtube video amongst the substratum of this very blog.
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Life is now going live
Life. Don't, of course, talk to me about life. I'd rather talk to you about it.
It just occurred to me, you see, that philosophy is a most curious notion. It's a life recursion - people spend their lives trying to determine the purpose of their lives, when they've made the purpose of their lives to find the purpose of their lives, thus making the whole thing rather pointless, and the answer blindingly obvious. Whooh. Glad I didn't have to say that one aloud. I might have hurt myself.
It's just more validation, really, that we never really like the answer, because we're not asking the right question.
So, I propose the field of meta-philosophy (no, this isn't meta-humour, Sarah, it's an unusual but serious notion) - the study of finding the right questions for people to study. Maybe if we turned all those Tibetan monks trying to find all the names of God to examining every question anyone has ever turned away because they didn't, personally, have the time to think about it, we'd find a decent answer, and finally know, once and for all, the Question to the Ultimate Answer of Life, The Universe and Everything.
It just occurred to me, you see, that philosophy is a most curious notion. It's a life recursion - people spend their lives trying to determine the purpose of their lives, when they've made the purpose of their lives to find the purpose of their lives, thus making the whole thing rather pointless, and the answer blindingly obvious. Whooh. Glad I didn't have to say that one aloud. I might have hurt myself.
It's just more validation, really, that we never really like the answer, because we're not asking the right question.
So, I propose the field of meta-philosophy (no, this isn't meta-humour, Sarah, it's an unusual but serious notion) - the study of finding the right questions for people to study. Maybe if we turned all those Tibetan monks trying to find all the names of God to examining every question anyone has ever turned away because they didn't, personally, have the time to think about it, we'd find a decent answer, and finally know, once and for all, the Question to the Ultimate Answer of Life, The Universe and Everything.
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