These are pages for people who have looked life in the face and found it odd, brutal, absurd, beautiful, empty, or all of the above before lunch.
I am a hospital chaplain working from a non-religious, existential perspective, with a PhD in Psychology. Much of what appears here comes from living alongside suffering, mortality, humour, and the difficult business of being human.
Once upon a time this was a blog about the pointlessness of existence. The blog is retired, but the questions remain. The site now serves as a small front door to the book, the worldview behind it, and a curated shelf of writers for people who want to think more seriously about freedom, suffering, mortality, absurdity, and the strange business of being here at all.
You do not need to agree with these writers. You only need to be willing to be bothered by them.
Mortality
A non-religious reflection on mortality, suffering, attachment, and finitude.
Life is a piece of shit and then you die. There is a darkness around us. Meaninglessness. Incomprehensibility. Purposelessness. The earth is the only place where care exists between us. We huddle around a fire. Born out of the purposeless process of evolution. We didn’t ask to be born. But here we are. Extant in a universe that cares not one whit. Fine.
There is no up or down. No right or wrong. Let him who is without sin cast the first stone. Mortality then? How strange it is to be anything at all. The gnat laments his short lot. Apologies to all beings upon whom existence is inflicted. Kierkegaard’s words ring true: hang yourself, you’ll regret it. Don’t hang yourself, you will regret that too. Cessation of being is just another of life’s cruel circumstances.
I work in a hospital, and see that the joke often wears thin. Childhood may be fun, but I’m not sure I’d wish old age and infirmity on my worst enemy. We live, we die. Try not to take it too seriously, and perhaps then you will not be the butt of the joke. Love one another deeply, for what other choice is there? Loss can be unbearable, but I’m not sure covering yourself in goose fat and running through life without making deep attachments is the solution.
The absurdity. The weirdness. The terror. These are normal reactions to the infinite uncaring universe. Life is death by a thousand cuts. Death: the final insult. The end of the problem.
Meaning
An earlier reflection, written during my masters-level training, on meaning, continuity, and existence.
What does my life mean? Obviously this is a question I have dwelt upon. Everything is pointless. But some things are more pointless than others. (Is that distinction a deep or shallow gradient? Are all other mountains shorter than Everest, or is it a virtually featureless desert, where the only Everest is the smallest of pebbles?)
I imagine a web. Below is an infinity of meaninglessness. But tentatively supporting my weight is this tenuous gossamer thread. An ectoplasm of justness. I touch the smooth fossilised footprint of a long extinct dinosaur. My hand examines the space. A creature once stood here. It lived. It breathed. It died. And now there are no more. Not it. Not its mates. Not its offspring. But there is continuity there. From the first life-form to this footprint to me. Truth. Existence. Being. This footprint means something.
I leave footprints. The dinosaur had no understanding. Not even an inkling. But even when the earth is boiled away into nothingness, I existed. Painful. Strange. Absurd. A chimera of authentic and inauthentic. Social and individual. My address: Louie. The ape. This time. This space. Now.
Cinéma vérité then. Not meaning in the sense of a parable. I do not live by virtue of an overarching lesson. I am not a character in a play whose actions are pre-scripted. Minute by minute I inhabit my skull. I feel the freedom and the limitations. The folds of my cerebellum leave an imprint upon the bone. I am not a solipsist. I am an existentialist and nihilist. Temporary meaning subsumed in a wider nothingness of unmeaning. The thread breaks. I descend into the darkness. To join all kin of being. But I did exist. We did exist. Whatever else is true or false, that is a meaning. To me at least.
Book
What I call a “book” is really the two most important pieces from the original blog. Together they sketch the perspective behind this site: reflections on meaning, pointlessness, suffering, and the strange fact that human beings keep going anyway.
Resources
A selection of texts for people interested in alienation, absurdity, suffering, freedom, morality, finitude, and the human animal.
Kafka
Kafka is for when life starts to feel accusatory. For when the ordinary turns sinister. For when family, work, the body, and the world all become faintly hostile.
Camus
Camus is for when you want clarity without false hope. He is one of the best guides to the absurd because he refuses both despair and consolation.
Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky is for when existence becomes feverish. He writes about guilt, freedom, humiliation, God, rebellion, and the ridiculous extremes of being human.
Kierkegaard
Kierkegaard is for when anxiety, despair, inwardness, and the burden of becoming oneself become unavoidable.
Sartre
Sartre is for when you need the unpleasant news. You are free. You are responsible. You cannot permanently hide behind your role, your temperament, or your preferred mythology about yourself.
Nietzsche
Nietzsche is for when the old values have collapsed but you are not interested in crawling back to them. He is not soothing, but he is alive.
Darwin
Darwin is here because existential questions are not only philosophical. They are also biological. Human beings like to imagine themselves as somehow above nature. Darwin is useful medicine for that.
Heidegger, if you must
Heidegger matters. He also sometimes reads like a man trying to force language to confess. Still, if you want anxiety, finitude, and thrownness, he belongs here.
Short texts and poems
- Percy Bysshe Shelley — Complete Poetical Works, Vol. 2 (includes Ozymandias) — Empires come. Empires go. Sand remains smug.
Most older public-domain texts here point to Project Gutenberg. Some later works remain on Archive.org or other lawful sources, and availability can change.
Contact
If you want to get in touch, ask a question, or say hello, email: [email protected]