Hipsters and the beauty of irony

"Look, and it can't be seen.

Listen, and it can't be heard.

Reach, and it can't be grasped.

...

You can't know it, but you can be it,

at ease in your own life.

Just realise where you came from:

this is the essence of wisdom." Lao-Tzu, Tao-te-ching

At the turn of the 21st Century the world expected a progression, or at the very least change. Philosophically, and politically, idealism had died. People had either lost faith, found it was no longer relevant or simply wasn't believed anymore. The ideas of Hegel and the Young Hegelians, notably Karl Marx, were proving unsatisfactory to a great deal of people. If their ideas weren't discarded they were at least modified and personalised.

Following the expansion of Existentialism and Absurdism following the Second World War, the world seemed to have changed. Not only did it seem to get smaller, it got more hostile as more people surrounded us yet all the while individuals felt isolated and alone. Our role in the world as a person became more and more miniscule.

Danger lurked around every corner, the threat of nuclear war was fresh in the public's mind after Hiroshima/Nagasaki and the Cuban Missile crisis, and conflict remained constant. Permanent fear.  Colonialism and Imperialism still existed - despite the slow decline of monarchies - but in different forms under various pretenses.
The 60's gave birth to the all-loving hippies as a result. But by the 80's most had sold out and cashed in. Now in the second decade of the 21st Century, where do we stand?

Existential crisis

"It is these very people, always harping upon realism, who complain that existentialism is too gloomy a view of things. Indeed their excessive protests make me suspect that what is annoying them is not so much our pessimism, but, much more likely, our optimism.

In the doctrine [of existentialism] it confronts man with a possibility of choice.

Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world - and defines himself afterwards...he will be what he makes of himself...Man simply is." - Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism & Humanism

We live in an environment where we can know nothing about it, yet understanding is what we most want. We want it to the extent that we lie to ourselves about all the 'knowledge' we think we have about ourselves, each other and everything around us. Each of us at this realisation feels and experiences solitude and isolation from the world we thought we once knew - we lose our innocence.

We can muster no reason to continue or to stop so we are bound to inaction, which is itself a logically forbidden path for the very act of choosing not to choose is a choice. We find ourselves in a situation where the choice between acting or not acting is an act in itself and by that very nature disallows a choice to be made. Yet we act anyway.
This conclusion derives from the uncertainty and lack of reasonable proof that anything exists or exists in the way we imagine it to. This has it's roots in Cartesian doubt where it is argued that nothing exists beyond the ego. In the end, we are compelled logically, emotionally and physically to make an inductive jump in reasoning and make a choice. We are forced to do so. It is my opinion that the direction we make a leap of faith towards is down to our natural inclination. We continue where we left off before doubt played us for a fool.
Growing up, one learns how to act before one learns how to think. We act instinctually out of hedonism and satisfaction as babies and children. Only after we have explored our personal world and learned a small bit about the rest of our planet do we begin to think.

An insight into my (large) ego

"Knowing others is intelligence;

knowing yourself is true wisdom.

 Mastering others is strength;

mastering yourself is true power." - Lao Tzu, Tao-te-ching.

In my view, from everything I have seen and encountered, arrogance is simply admission and modesty is nothing greater than omission. If the popular consensus were taken into account, the definitions would change the definition of arrogance to pretentious self-belief, and modesty to humble ignorance. With this in mind, let me continue.

Examine your life and compare

"It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.

Life is long enough... But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death's final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing." - Seneca, On the Shortness of Life.

The Buddha taught that suffering existed because we let it. Some of us, for example, utilitarians and egotists, may argue that humans are simply trying to avoid suffering and experience happiness when they act. So how is it that we allow this to happen? The answer is attachments.

We've attached ourselves to things which, ironically, make us fall into the pits of suffering and misery. When we judge our own or other people's actions, thoughts and feelings, we are enforcing our urge to embrace that which we like and approve of and reject that which we do not onto ourselves. When we seek pleasure and avoid pain, not only do we create unachievable goals, but we create attachments to things such as luxuries, money, sex, posessions and other undeserved futilities. Events are outwith our control, we cannot choose what happens to us. That which we attach ourselves to only adds to our upset. Attachments vary from attachments to money to the physical world and to the past and future. Unless we begin to realise and become content with what we actually do have in the present and understand what truly matters, or better yet, all the things that do not matter - then we will continue suffering.
The only method, according to Siddharta Gautama, to end the cycle of attachment and suffering is through realisation, an awakening - enlightenment. We realise through understanding, which is through thinking, which in turn derives from observation. To undo our cycle of suffering, we must start by observing the world in which we live and suffer. And so, I invite you.