Absurdity

I can feel like I don’t want to be part of this world.

When I’m dreaming, what happens in the dream can seem to make total sense. Then I wake up and reflect on the dream and realize that it didn’t make sense. It didn’t make sense that I could breathe underwater. It didn’t make sense that I could sort through my emotions by putting them on a spreadsheet. It didn’t make sense that someone died and then they were alive again. And I can think the same about life.

When I think about life, it’s strange. It doesn’t seem to make sense how life is. To think about it is like waking up from a dream and realizing the dream didn’t make sense, except in this case, you’re still in the dream. You’re still dreaming but you notice the nonsense—lucid dreaming.

You can compare dreaming to waking life, taking waking life to be real, and note the differences to tell if the dream made sense or not. But what is there to compare life to? How can one say that life doesn’t make sense when there is nothing else to compare it to, when all we know is part of life, even dreams? Life doesn’t make sense with respect to what? Even so, life can often seem not to make much sense. Maybe it’s comparing the seemingly sensical parts of life to the nonsensical. Or maybe it’s not so much “sense” as in real or realistic as it is “sense” as in understanding.

Maybe things are too complex or complicated. There’s an invisible system running behind the scenes that greatly benefits a few and disadvantages many. It’s a runaway train that if people try to stop, they’ll be flattened and crushed, but then if the train does stop, there could be a buttload of unintended and unforeseen consequences. It might have been better if the system was never created in the first place as it simultaneously and perpetually creates and solves its own problems. And seemingly, that’s what life does. The system mimics life.