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The Necessity to Struggle / The Futility of Effort

2019-02-26 · letter vlog · John · 3:39 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Philosophy & meaning · mode: Personal essay

Waiting at an airport gate, John spirals from noticing that everyone there will be dead within a century into nihilistic despair, then argues that both despair and joy in the human enterprise are correct, that the useful question is which view is productive, and that effort is never futile while people share in it and benefit from it.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — At the airport gate: everyone there will be dead within a century; how temporary we are despite efforts to feel permanent

  • ★★ Sitting at an airport gate waiting for his flight to Detroit, John couldn't stop thinking that everyone in the airport would be dead within a century or so. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ John says the present moment will one day feel distant like an old picture and then be entirely forgotten; it is absurd how temporary we are despite our efforts to feel permanent. — 00:00:29

00:00:58 — The spiral into nihilistic disgust (stuff, carbon, a geologic nanosecond) and how quickly his mind gets there

  • ★★ Thinking further, John began to feel nihilistic, angry and disgusted by everything, from a man loudly discussing supply chains on his Bluetooth headset to how much stuff everyone has. — 00:00:58
  • ★ In that mood John thinks of the airport as the Hunger Games with himself a resident of the capital, its acquired stuff headed for landfills and its air travel adding carbon for no good reason. — 00:01:27 · climate change
  • ★★ In the spiral, John is disgusted at people pretending human effort matters when our species will be gone in a geologic nanosecond, a brief blip in the planet's story. — 00:01:27 · meaning of life
  • ★★ John is astonished how quickly his mind goes from future fashion to 'nothing matters', yet with a friend, a soft pretzel and talk of AFC Wimbledon he feels the human enterprise is good and noble. — 00:01:56 · AFC Wimbledon

00:02:26 — Both worldviews are correct; choose the productive one; Fitzgerald's balance; we struggle on together

  • ★★★ John thinks both worldviews are correct: human life is beautiful, and we are all going to die and much of what we cared about will be rendered irrelevant by time. — 00:02:26 · meaning of life
  • ★★★ For John the question is not which view is true but which is productive: if despair cut his carbon emissions he'd be for it, but it mostly leaves him empty and inert. — 00:02:26 · climate change

  • ★★★ John works when he feels hope, when he can, in F. Scott Fitzgerald's words, hold in balance the sense of the futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle. — 00:02:55 · hope

    “to hold in balance the sense of the futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle”

  • ★★★ John believes effort is never futile so long as there are people to share in it and people who might benefit from it. — 00:02:55

  • ★★★ John says maybe nothing will matter in the grand scheme of things, but we don't live there: we live in the day-to-day, at gate A7 on a Wednesday afternoon. — 00:02:55 · meaning of life

    “we don't live in the grand scheme of things”

  • ★★ John says we struggle on together not because humans are great and eternal but because we are vulnerable and need each other, in hope for the lives to come and those we share now. — 00:03:24

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: death anxiety · meaning of life

Also: AFC Wimbledon · climate change · Detroit · F. Scott Fitzgerald · hope · nihilism · The Hunger Games (book series)

Also centred on death anxiety: Oinkbarf Pandemic! An Intellectual Response to Swine Flu · Our Grandfather · You Will Be Forgotten ...And That's OK · It's About a YouTuber with Cancer · Let's Talk About Death

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