HW 30- Theorizing "cool"

What are the sources of this sense of meaninglessness but also of the need for a sense of meaning?

In Viktor Frankl's theory of "The Existential Vacuum", he states; If meaning is what we desire, then meaninglessness is a hole, an emptiness, in our lives.. I think that this statement is highly reflective of the nature of the human being. We constantly subject ourselves to pushing ourselves and being better than we were the day before. This is because we are trying to find our sense of meaning. We than create a self sustaining system of rewarding ourselves for working hard. Being lazy makes us feel unimportant and worthless, but when we work hard, we fill that void, and we don't feel lazy. Since we need to have this hole to fill, being lazy ever once in a while allows us to put our lives back into perspective, thus creating the hole in the first place!

In class, I concluded that this search for coolness, is the result of our existence as intelligent beings. I believe that the "curse" if you will, of being human, is that we are developed enough to contemplate our own existence. While we can theorize and analyze our behaviors, we are just not able to answer the question; why are we here? I believe, that we than try to break this down into smaller parts, which lead us to think about our social roles. A more manageable question could be to ask ourselves where we fit into social groups, or if we even fit in at all. These questions are what we would call "cool".

Basically, it might be easy to think about my theory as a phone bill with two payment options. Lets say, "plan a" has an option to pay the bill as a flat rate, and another to pay in increments over a period of time. If we don't have much money, we will opt for the installment plan, and even if we do, it is still more cost effective to pay with the incremental option. In a similar way, we aren't capable of answering the questions of our existence, because they are simply complex. We have to break down the question into "installments" so we can deal with the smaller questions at hand which make up the overall question of our being.

I think that it is our search for meaning that drives our consumption of pop-culture, which becomes our attempts to become cool. In a nutshell, we look at the world through a defeatist lens, and give up as soon as we see something which can distract us from questions we think cannot be answered. Basically "things" become our purpose for living, and we lose ourselves even more, causing us to be counterproductive in our quest to find our meaning. The problem is, when we broke down the question of human purpose, we did not start at step one, we started to answer another question entirely. The meaning of life is much more basic and less romantic than we want to believe, and thus we have convinced ourselves that the meaning of life has to do with how we interact with each-other, and "making the world a better place".

Being so heavily concerned with coolness is a sign that we are under the impression that we have already answered this question, and have moved on to concerning ourselves with more trivial affairs. The proof, is that we know what the meaning of life is not, but we occupy our time not fulfilling that meaning anyway. If you asked anyone what their purpose was, I highly doubt they would say in all seriousness, "to listen to my ipod". We don't dress trendy, or listen to popular music because we think it is our calling in life. We do that because we subscribe to a motivational state of mind, based on pleasure. This was a theory created by Sigmund Freud, who believed that human motivation was based of of the pleasure part of our brains.

Becoming obsessed with pleasing ourselves is completely unrelated to finding our meaning, and is the root of meaninglessness. I propose, that being driven by pleasure is what drives meaninglessness, and being driven by your goals, gives us meaning. The importance of the question of our existence, is not that we need to answer it, but that we try to answer it. The massive goal which that gives us in life, drives our will to live at the most basic of levels. I don't know the meaning of life, and its hard to say if anyone ever will. What I can say, is that as long as we seek out and continue to slowly define what makes us important in the scheme of things, we will never be without meaning, and our lives will never be meaningless.



When a cause comes along and you know in your bones that it is just, yet refuse to defend it--at that moment you begin to die. And I have never seen so many corpses walking around talking about justice. - Mumia Abu-Jamal

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