There is an instance somewhere in greater happy moments when, beyond the elation, we sense the dread fear that everything is pointless, fleeting, meaningless, and absurd. When we hear the chorus of our favorite song, or share something special with others, or enjoy a good meal, or feel happy on a beach or at a party or in a conversation, there's some nagging semiconscious realization in some corner of our minds that however special our feelings at that moment may be, they are ultimately futile and doomed. We know the moment passes, and the end comes, and the overwhelming boredom and suffocation of existence resumes where it left off, in the guise of routine and duty and a resumption of the fear that binds our life with others; the fear that we are or will be unsuccessful, unsatisfying, unattractive, unhappy, lagging behind, not doing everything we could do, and just generally worrying that we will never be who we need to be or want to be. If anything, our lives could be considered a series of foolhardy attempts to defeat that existential dread and paranoia, only to have it always slink its way out in the end. The sun always rises, the song always ends, and the boulder of emotions we painstakingly rolled up to some wonderful new summit always comes tumbling back down again.
And yet we all try and do the best we can. We all try and find some kind of comforting thought system that will somehow take those passing moments of happiness and weave them into a greater, more durable ideological tapestry. We try to trick our minds into finding some kind of permanence to happiness, in a world where it's always gone as soon as it's there. Some of us take to religion or pseudo-religious spiritualism with which we create an imaginary purpose in life along with the promise of permanence after death in which some kind of eternal element (soul, spirit) within us lives blissfully forever in a magic place somewhere where all moments forever are blissful moments, like that moment when we kiss someone for the first time, or dive into a cold crisp sea in July, or when you've had that second drink and you and your friends are laughing and loving each other's company early on in the evening when you have the whole night to look forward to. We all want to prolong that moment eternally, to make that moment the rule rather than the exception, yet don't know how, and despair at this. In fact, that's all we all look for in our lives, constantly, unceasingly, sometimes consciously, mostly unconsciously. Those who don't go for ready-made packaged fantastic feel-good religiosity instead seek a concatenated repetition of intense moments with which to create a never-ending chain of brief elations that somehow give the illusion of permanence and constancy. Addicts do this: drug addicts, alcoholics, junk food addicts, sex addicts, shopping addicts, friendship addicts who can't bear to be alone, or even music addicts who go from song to song, concert to concert, hunting down that feel-good moment when the music and the mind and the company merge magically, magnificently for brief crescendos that last a few seconds before they're gone again, and you're left hunting them down again, trying to capture them somehow, again and again and again.
Some of us try to find a hope for happiness in love. Biology both helps and hinders us in this way. It helps because we need to meet people and meeting a person you want to have sex with is naturally a happy moment, because if it weren't happiness-inducing then we might rather eat ice cream instead of procreate, which means the human race would all soon be a big fat mass of rotting corpses. It hinders us because ultimately love, too, is fleeting and impermanent; it lasts until you have kids, at best, and then both people are done with each other and they only care about the kids and their relationship turns into some kind of inescapable codependence trapped in two sagging, aging, graying, withering, weakening, yellowing, flabbening bodies.
So then where is there hope? It seems the problem is hope in the first place. How can we hope for that which the universe is fundamentally against? Why do we greedily, hungrily, desperately try and clutch at happiness in the hope of some kind of permanence? How can we stop the brutal onslaught, when the very laws of thermodynamics are ranged against us? We're addicted to elation, to happiness, and we're unhappy because of it, because it's always so unsatisfactorily short-lived, and we're always afraid that it's somewhere where we're missing out on it, somewhere we always have to travel to to find it, somewhere where others have it, but not us.
But if we accept there is no hope, if we accept that happiness is by nature fleeting and impermanent and that life, despite some brilliant moments, is generally boring, meaningless, pointless and hollow, we could achieve a kind of tragic heroism where we stand strong in the face of the horrible and inevitable truth, firm and resolute, despite the futility of it all. That's the appeal of tragedy in art, that's the appeal of Aeschylus and Euripides and Sophocles and Homer, of Byron and Beckett and Rimbaud, of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. If we take the right philosophical outlook, we too can become tragic and gain a perverse sense of happiness in adversity, thereby making something positive and fortifying out of it, rather than try and find that decadent and unsatisfying kind of bovine happiness in mere pleasure, bliss, ease, comfort and security. This isn't to say that life shouldn't be enjoyed and great moments experienced, but we would be much less unhappy when not experiencing those great moments by keeping in perspective the realities of existence, rather than flailing desperately to avoid, deny or put up a quixotic fight against them.
We must also use logic to our advantage. After all, we could say that if happiness is fleeting, then conversely, so is misery. Why only dwell on how the good and happy times eventually fade? Why not gain a sense of happiness in knowing that other good and happy times will come, and that if happiness is fleeting and ephemeral, then so is the feeling of sadness, loneliness and despair that make up the other moments in existence when we're not busying ourselves with gadgets or sports or work or hobbies or movies and other stuff. Of course, one could argue that existential despair is rather permanent, that sometimes we can ignore it or drown it out with meaningless endeavors, but that everything always gets sucked back to it eventually. And that's where we assume the aforementioned tragic stance. That's where we become a philosopher on a mountain or a poet on a rocky cliff, if only (though not necessarily) figuratively. We become conscious of and then reinternalize the emptiness and the void, we own the void, we choose the void, we master the void, and we take pride in a lonesome, mighty, futile stand, as we turn it into something greater: art.
Art is no answer or resolution in itself. It isn't some cheesy attempt to deny the meaninglessness of life with trite ideals and empty promises of eternal bliss or immortality of some sort. Art is hijacked for those purposes by religions, but only the kind of art that is shorn of its meaning and essence. Only the technical, aesthetic dimension of art is utilized, and without it, without the paintings and the stained-glass windows and the music and the choirs and the beautiful architecture, religion would be unappealing. But pure art is the process through which we come to terms with life, the truth of life, shorn of all the bullshit. It's a direct gaze at something incomprehensible and terrible, and yet the very act of creation it entails acts in itself as a remedy to inaction, which is one of the gravest (and most feared) consequences of the realization of the meaninglessness of life. So rather than despairing and staying in bed and not being able to do anything because everything seems meaningless, you can affirm that tragic meaninglessness and make something of it, something that demands effort and labor and energy and thought and creativity, all of which finds renewed vigor and an outlet through art. And although the artwork seems meaningless, it has an aesthetic dimension, it has a technical aspect, it was created by your hands and, most importantly, it was inspired by the meaninglessness itself. After all, art is the pursuit of exploring our existence in a world we don't fully understand, a world where meaning is missing (as opposed to the religious world which has meaning, albeit a flimsy band-aid of a meaning). Art is therefore always a kind of representation of meaninglessness, which actually - paradoxically - infuses it with meaning. In fact, the artwork is the only thing in life that acquires meaning, that transcends its mere thingness or use-value. Nothing is not nothing any longer when it becomes a word that represents nothing, because "nothing" then represents something. By the same token, meaninglessness is no longer meaningless when it inspires and elicits a creation that represents it, thereby making it meaningful... if not exactly hopeful.
Of course, we could also shun art as mere child's play and still deny the meaninglessness and sadness of life by immersing ourselves in half-baked and semi-thought-through spiritualist philosophies or "serious" religions that do give concrete answers (which are really just ornate lies) and that seek to hide the truth from our eyes, to deny the pain and anguish as believers try instead to keep fooling themselves with feel-good pap. This is the way for most people. We fill our lives with fake meaning, or just fill our lives with trivialities that occupy our minds and time, like politics, football teams, cars, nationalism, games, the endless acquisition of things, and generally that which is fed us as being the accepted way of doing things by agents of authority. But none of that is important or acceptable, and nobody should ever respect any authority.
Then again, why should we worry about any of this at all? Why not just ignore the fleetingness of the good and happy moments, and just bite the bullet and deal with the painful realization of the latent monstrosity of existence? When you're young and things are tipped in your favor, this is usually the case anyway. There isn't too much reason or time or need to face reality, to look inside and confront the void in us and in everything. When we're young, our life is too full of stuff. But that stuff gets spent up and lost along the way, things thin out, excitement and novelty fades, people slowly disappear from your life, choices and opportunities lessen, and there are generally less things to shield our eyes from what lurks beneath and beyond. When things are in our favor we could take on all the gods ever created by the human mind, but things are not always in our favor, and they gradually become less so as time goes on. That's when the stoic, tragic, heroic, artistic philosophical stance can come to our rescue, and we can at least tame those disheartening feelings and moods with the whip of reason, by accepting rather than trying to obfuscate the vacant truths underlying existence. Furthermore, beyond (and in fact, despite) reason, through art, we can turn those feelings and moods into meaningful and beautiful creations, in spite of the void. And we can also take heart in the fact that bad times are also fleeting, and that while they may be fewer and farther in between as the years wear on, there will still be more good times to come.
This isn't to say we shouldn't keep busy, read books, listen to music, fall in love, and travel to new places and enjoy the wonderfulness of life either. We should. But if we don't also grant ourselves the necessary philosophical armor for life, we risk feeling depressed that we might never enjoy any of those things truly, deeply, fully, anymore. We will become desperate, vain, narcissistic exhibitionists, trying to squeeze meaning and more from moments that simply can't give us what we want, that simply aren't fertile enough, as we strive to find a sense of self-worth and importance and recognition and beauty in trivial things and events that we become addicted to, that we need to keep chasing down and recreating so as to maintain that concatenation of feel-good moments that we mistake for substance, happiness and constancy. To find hope in such a wasteland as that is futile. The armor should always be within, like a backbone that gives us strength, rather than comprised of a patchwork of brittle and exposed superficies behind which to cower and hide.
Once we lose hope, we can gain everything back, we can enjoy everything once more, and even the pain and the meaninglessness and the futility of existence can become for us a source of joy.
