jeff yen

I apologize for the unreasonable amount of introspection that’s about to hit you. The kava’s wearing off, I guess. Also be forewarned, there’s no real point to the following, just some late-night navel gazing, accompanied by a glass that is neither half full nor half empty.

“No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main.”
John Donne, Meditation XVII

John Donne was wrong, as are all the people who’ve (mis)quoted him over the years. There are men… and women… who are islands, entire of themselves. More popularly, they are islands unto themselves. The issue is not whether these men and women can be disconnected to others about them. The problem is that such people are, and forever will be, only who they are, and nothing else.

Who they (and therefore, we) are, essentially, are bags of liquids and minerals. Blank slates. Unfulfilled potential. This is not a bad thing. In fact, it’s incredible, considering all the various bags of liquids and minerals that can’t walk, talk, or quote other, long-dehydrated bags of liquids and minerals in angsty ways on the internet.

However, it’s not necessarily a good thing, either. Here comes the raving.

A human being; that is, an individual physical specimen of homo sapien sapiens, by him or herself, cannot be “human” in anything other than a purely scientific sense. Imagine that you are the wisest, most brilliant, and most spiritual human being in the world, and you generate the most mind-blowing artwork/philosophy/invention ever. Now imagine that nothing, and no-one, will ever know or appreciate what you’ve created, or that you ever were. Note that this is an atheistic hypothetical… there’s no omniscient checking out your guitar riff, theory of life, or Atomic Port-a-Potty. So… what are you?

Nothing. This is not a question of credit. It doesn’t matter if people know it was you who created this thing. What matters is that nobody will ever see the proof of your existence, or know your story. The question is not whether you existed or not, because in a physical and temporal sense, yes, you did. The question is, whether you mattered.

In the hypothetical above? Not a whit.

In the average person’s everyday life? Absolutely. We work, we play, we live and love. We touch lives as easily as sunlight hits our face when we step outside so the dog can scrub his ass on the neighbor’s lawn. We are given purpose and meaning by our friends, our family, or that homeless guy who got a couple bucks from us.

The point: we are defined by the lives we move, and how we move them. If there is no-one for me to affect (or, realistically, if I have no meaningful effect on those that I can), then there is, for all practical intents and purposes, no me.

As a corollary, if I am granted the time, ability, and means with which to move lives positively, and I fail to do so… what kind of existence am I leading?

That’s the kind of question I ask myself when I get into these moods. I might as well get an eyebrow piercing and black lipstick.

I know this is not exactly original thought. This probably treads pretty close (for or against) to a lot of established philosophy, but I’m not nearly well-read enough to know how closely. One marginally relevant example off the top of my head:

- Cogito, ergo sum.

From Descartes, this is pretty simple. I think, therefore I am. In a pure sense, this is absolutely true. If there is something or someone to think that thought, then by definition they exist. In a larger sense, however, this is patently false, and also incredibly egotistical. “I think, therefore I am” only applies, in the pure sense, to the inside of your own head. While, in an arguably valid sense, the entire universe exists nowhere but inside your head, I prefer to think in less radical terms. The man sitting next to you on the bus doesn’t know what you’re thinking, if anything at all. For all he knows, it’s just white noise (or, worse, this show) in there. Therefore, “I think, therefore I am” becomes useless except in the context of French philosophers, laying in bed alone with the sheets drawn up to their chins.

For the purposes of wider application, I might suggest: I matter, therefore I am. I don’t know enough Latin to do a proper translation, so let’s say… uh… Coitus, ergo cum laude. It won’t get you anywhere in philosophy, but it might get a snicker out of your PHIL1A prof, provided he or she ate a lot of paste in art class. Me, I feel dumber just from having written that down. Der…..

Translations aside, the point remains. As long as you are relevant, as long are you are important in some way to something or someone, then you are. The moment you have no importance or relation to anything or anyone other than yourself, then you have ceased to exist in any meaningful way. I haven’t worked out how you can be important to a thing yet, so don’t ask to buy my Import-a-Matic (only 3 easy payments of $39.99). People did buy Pet Rocks, though. Hmmm….

There’s a similar school of thought pertaining to deities. Basically, the gods of the universe are created through belief, and are sustained by it. Zapping the occasional rival temple with a lightning bolt, or granting some schlub in the countryside a three-headed dong… key, is just a way of keeping the believers in line. As believers stop believing, the gods get progressively weaker, until finally, they’re playing metaphysical banjos in the woods while Jon Voigt is giving Burt Reynolds a bikini wax on a rubber raft in the 5th dimension.

Yeah, I never did manage to see all of that movie.