Existential Question

Y/N: Assessing today’s world of eight billion people, would you accept the hypothetical offer to be freshly born into it with the understanding your personal circumstances would be totally randomly assigned e.g. place of birth? A slight variation: With what you know today, would you choose to relive your current life without first having had the foreknowledge of how it has actually played out?

Apologies for such sophomoric questions but they are meant as a backhanded invitation to the broader philosophical question raised by Camus about the absurdity of life or, more precisely, the matter of how to live one's life in the face of its essential meaninglessness. He reduces that premise to the starkest of terms, "There is only one really serious philosophical problem and that is suicide" (from which all serious questions emanate).

A general philosophical discussion is one thing; real life may be another. At least one club member, in fact an occasional Member Monday participant, took her life a year ago, giving rise to the question whether some frank and honest discussion about an otherwise taboo subject might have made a difference. Our focus article (Living Through Suicidal Moments) provides an up close and personal account of a subject that probably churns below the surface of many age groups.

There is zero shame in talking about this. One might argue that those who have never given any thought to the existential question of life’s meaning – including the choice whether or not to experience the “slings and arrows” of Hamlet’s soliloquy – might be suffering from a certain lack of curiosity and imagination.

More important than some philosophical reckoning, though, is to simply recognize the black bats of dark impulses flapping about. The author tells his students suicide is all around us and posits “if we had a switch on our bellies that we could flip to end our lives, no one would make it to age eighteen.”

May we be open to sharing our own personal coping mechanisms. One personal one was the subject of MM 6/10/19 Good/Bad . . . We'll See, centered around the Chinese parable highlighting the equanimity that comes with the recognition that no event can be judged as good or bad except in the fullness of one’s lifetime, if even then. That might actually be a useful exercise for all of us as we endeavor to come to terms with our own inevitable mortality.

For the denial of one’s mortality may rank as one of life’s most notable absurdities.