Deducing the Absurdity of Reality

Falsely Assigned Meaning

Any purpose and meaning our species may have is not for us to give to ourselves. For a meaning to our existence to be truly meaningful, it must transcend our existence.

An ant in an ant farm might assume its meaning is its purpose: its role in the colony. But that role is not for the ant to assign to itself. A tool, a pet, an NPC — they don’t get to make up purpose, and therefore, meaning for themselves. That is the ultimate hubris.

We cannot assign meaning to ourselves: it needs to be assigned to us from whatever made us, assuming we were made with purpose, and we’re not just a random emergence of astronomical improbability. If we are indeed made from randomness, then our lives have absolutely no meaning, and therefore, any meaning we ourselves give to our lives is pointless, futile, and hollow.

Because this meaning is denied us, we can safely conclude that nature, or god, or reality, is completely indifferent to us, at best. Scores of badly written “holy” texts, each with contradicting versions and arbitrary interpretations, are nowhere near explaining what this reality is all about. Call me a skeptic, but choosing any of the religions that boast exclusivity while demanding gullibility over unprovable, unfalsifiable claims (under the threat of eternal sadistic torture, no less) is not a quest for truth; it’s the ultimate self-deluded certainty of false truth.

Whatever made us, whether a random big bang or a semi-conscious deity, for which our toil and wonder are as meaningless to it as dust, does not give a rat’s ass about us. This is a demonstrable deduction from what we are witnessing daily: child abuse and child molestation, birth deformities, mental illness, the psychopathy of war, humans’ innate susceptibility to brain-damaging psychological abuse, and the torture of seeking meaning without it ever being within your reach; abandoned here by your creator, which is well aware of your suffering specifically because it has deliberately designed you to be thus.

I would even go as far as to suggest that this possible creator is deliberately malicious, or at least unbound by the purview of human morality. If this is so, human morality becomes as meaningless as our unsolicited existence, no matter how much we try to sanctify our lives with delusions of higher ideals. Morality, it seems, serves us by granting us a sense of individual identity and thus meaning. But again, this is a meaning that is not transcendent. You can live a life of utmost adherence to the highest of moral principles… and then what? What was it all for? What was the point?