I stopped doing the Old Man Cut Short posts weekly, this may have disappointed some people however I believe this gives me more time to come up with an interesting topic and gives a little more time for me to do something. Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
Time for me to try and answer the age-old question: What is the meaning of life? There have been many suggestions: breeding, creation, different for everyone, a Monty Python film, becoming a god (I might go into this further in another post) or achieving happiness (but call no man happy until he is dead).
Now, I believe that all of the above suggestions have their merits, but I believe more strongly that the meaning of life – especially for humans (if there is one and we’re not just an evolutionary mistake) – is to seek order from chaos and create order where there is none.
“But Lucas, can you back this up? Order from chaos seems like a strange meaning for life to have” you may say. And the answer is yes, I can back it up using religion, science, law and words as examples.
Religion, why do we have it? To many a religion is a well-constructed, perfectly valid belief system but to myself it is an incredibly primitive version of science. Religion seeks to keep order by having people obey a set of rules for behaviour and to explain the unexplainable, usually with the excuse for something like the creation of a species being ‘God did it.’ whoever that god may be. To me, order comes from reason and understanding so blaming gods is a way of getting reason to help us understand and control the chaos of the world because once you know what the variable is, you will then be able to manipulate it.
I’ll put science and medicine together for my next point. Science attempts to find reason, often involving an experiment or practical study as evidence. Biology uses the physical body and its contents to explain medical issues and learn the reason for each part’s existence. Chemistry focuses on the chemicals and elements that can be found throughout the world, explaining body imbalances (with biology) and how to create and use the world around us. Physics looks at energy and from physics, we have learned that the sun and reactions within it are possibly the reason for our existence and the source of all our power. Psychology, if we consider it to be a science seeks to understand the happenings inside the brain and give reasons for different behaviours. There may be more sciences, but these are enough to make the point that we get order from reason.
Law, politics and terrorism help to prove my point because the police arrest suspects and using the law put them in prison to remove the non-conforming, unpredictable people from society to make the world controllable, through control order can be maintained outside while chaos is locked behind bars. We elect politicians to deal with the bigger things in human life, they prevent wars and control the flow of money, making sure the world and all life on it isn’t destroyed in a scream filled dust cloud creating chaos in the world. And terrorism being a thing that creates chaos with fear and pain means it must be eradicated to keep the order that humans desire so much. Heath Ledger’s Joker gave a speech about schemers and their plans, that when plans go wrong everyone loses their mind, this is true, when plans go wrong order is destroyed and chaos reigns.
The jumbled-up letters on a keyboard are chaotic in their order, QWERTY instead of ABCDEF, of course there are reasons for this order to do with typewriters. Seemingly random letters don’t make sense, the alphabet itself doesn’t when you really think about it but it’s the standard way of doing things, so we don’t question it. We also use the random letters to create words that can be used to write a book or create reason and meaning, therefore creating order.
So, there we have it, my thoughts on the meaning of life, to find and create order from chaos, ordo ab chao. The only problem is that no matter how we reason or order things, chaos can still be found. Maybe the meaning of life is just to endlessly ponder the meaning of life.
And now to answer whether a month was long enough for me to do something worth writing about. I’m not sure I have.
I’ve looked at my weekly diet and found that I mostly survive on sausage rolls, pizzas and biscuits (while doing this I felt a bit like Jesse from The Fast Show, sitting and saying “This week I’ve been mostly eating…). Now I’m fairly certain that I don’t live a healthy lifestyle. Although I have made fresh pizzas which were nice.
With this site I’ve been paying a bit of attention to it but I’ve not had much focus. I did write a poem about a Goblin which I’m fairly proud of. I’ve also been showing support to the 4-Man Wall podcast which has been a nice way to spend my time.
I did get myself a domain name, so this is now LBcreative.me.
Twitter has been a focus of my energies for a lot of my free time as I’ve tried to build my reputation and promote my books (both my actual books and the page on the site).
I’ve done the usual stuff with the dog and work. I’ve bought some Xbox games and I’ve decided not to bother with Dungeons and Dragons. One of the more interesting things I’ve done is read about a man named Lu Bu, a man with a story like few others I have read and as far as I know It’s mostly true.
Rounding up for today I can only ask for thoughts in the comments on any of this and hope that everybody has a good month.