Life is very difficult. This is not a revelation but it bears repeating I think.

Joy is fleeting and usually involves a drug or two. Simple happiness and contentment is almost as fleeting and tends to stick you. Growth demands pain and turmoil. Life demands growth. Evolution is about the merciless churn of life and death.

This is the fascinating part I think. Nothing evolves, moves, gets better without destruction and pain. Even your puny self in this vast universal cauldron, has to suffer the bumps and bruises of simple life to be able to cope with the rest of it. Otherwise you wither and you die and you do not matter. If you can love you can love some more if you get over the loss. If you loose you need to win to get over the loss. If you win you need to lose to learn how to really win. Otherwise you just got lucky.

And maybe that’s enough. I don’t know really.

Lucky, favored by the gods, it amounts to the same thing.

Work all day, go home, live the accepted pattern of life, move on have kids, age and die.

That’s what we’re built for and it really does seem, to me anyway, empty. And yet, I’m jealous of all the people I know who have those lives, who live the same way each day and who will die mostly the same person they were when they got stuck at some random age due to a traumatic event or happy perfect time in their lives.

Evolve and grow and you suffer. To what end? Most of the mystical traditions assume there is a good reason to do so. Either an afterlife with a God who’s a good guy who’ll give you hundreds of whores and alcohol or just a simple transcending of the pain of living and having to worry about life being difficult.

They never much offer a good answer. I suppose it’s because you never get a good answer. Our brains are built to be satisfied with a “good enough” answer. If it feels right to you then that’s the answer. If it changes how you feel, then that’s the answer.

But imagine if you will this notion, if all life, from the algae to the humans, grows by meeting challenges and overcoming them, evolves if you will, then one could make a convincing analogy that stopping at some point of understanding, and being happy with that level of understanding the universe and how to live in it, is a kind of death since the failure to overcome a problem leads to death in life the failure to overcome the problem of life is a failure of your conscious evolution.

This leads to an interesting conundrum. You have to constantly grow and change your conception of the universe to be fully alive. Assume that for the moment. Then how do you cope with such an overwhelming pressure to push on. If you don’t you get stuck and you die (figuratively and eventually physically).

However, what would be the reality of keeping the evolution of the psyche? Is it possible? Can one keep growing? What would that really mean anyway?

Along similar lines is this essay by David Brin coming at the notion from a technological singularity of unimaginable human transition or dystopic nightmare.

I don’t know. I do know I got out of shooting someone’s wedding next week (which would have been my own personal dystopic nightmare) because I already had commitments and, while I could have changed them easily, that fucker didn’t bother to call me until the new wife got the notion that she needed a DVD to remember the day. So fuck that. He got a bullshit technological excuse that got him out of having to pay someone at least $300 for a crappy video (not enough light at night without even more lights). I got out of feeling guilty for saying “fuck you…now you call me?” Everyone wins! Woohoo!

Ah, glorious excuses that save each of us from the reality hiding behind life…what would we do without you?

Society would break down and we’d all slaughter each other by the end of tomorrow if it weren’t for the lies. That’s what would happen.