Continuing off that last post, this is actually something I’ve been meaning to write about for a long time. Now’s as good a time as any, I suppose.

Ever since the last incident (when my friend became disillusioned with me not fitting his notion of who I am), which happened at the end of 2011 into the beginning of this year, I’ve been dealing with a lot of paranoia and resentment about and regarding my friends. I can say this now because (hopefully) I’m over it. Twice I was confronted by friends who openly admitted to having conceptions of me that were based on superficial qualities– neither had any idea who I really was.

Now, to be fair, both of these people are good people. What they did, they did naively, and with only good intentions. Furthermore, they only do what we all do: without getting to know someone we come to judgments too quickly. We call this prejudice when those judgments are negative. Does it have a word for when those judgments are positive? Should it still be called prejudice? I wouldn’t want to call my friends prejudiced, even if it may be rhetorically true: I still consider them friends. However, it’s easy to tell yourself, “nobody gets me,” and it’s quite another to have that suspicion confirmed for you by those people you’d hope would have some better idea.

I began to interrogate all my relationships and myself. I wondered, who else has these false ideas about me? Should I act differently to prevent this? Dress differently? Should I get new friends? Am I broadcasting a false image of me? Am I being hypocritical, or misleading, or pretentious? Who’s opinion of me is “right”– what makes my own subjective picture of myself any more honest or correct than their subjective picture of me? I went through another personality crisis, although comparatively minor to what I’d went through in Ireland.

See, I’d moved to Galway in 2009 without intending to return to America. Due to some frustration with this country, but more due to a wanderlust that wouldn’t let me go and a manic terror of my own mortality, I decided to do something drastic, and moving to a foreign country seemed good enough. However, not long after I’d gotten there I came awake staring out the window of the cafe I was working in, still as a statue with broom in hand, completely unaware of how long I’d been standing there. I only came back from this daze when I’d suddenly thought, “this isn’t me.”

The word “dismal” was invented to describe Irish weather. I walked home that night, playing the few cacophonous and arguably unlistenable drones I listened to on repeat for a year, in the wind laden and wet and heavy and raw from the bay. I took Salthill road along the water, which began as a boardwalk and passed a small carnival of Ray Bradbury-esque surreality, and somewhere along there I walked down the stone steps and out onto the black beach. It was low tide and I wandered over the little ridges left by the receding tide, depressed but enjoying the soft texture through my shoes. The further I walked out into the quieter the world became: the wind blew away the noise of cars and people and I became lost in what felt like a paleolithic wasteland, a proto-Earth. I, estranged from my time, was surrounded by those bacteria that would eventually spawn legs and invent automobiles and bombs, but for now were barely visible, humble sea-spawn. The time I’d been given to live was barely a beat, hardly even a grace-note, and that already so filled with wasted efforts, confusion, and hesitation that I could only pray for reincarnation so that I might try again. At a certain point, I toyed with the idea that, my life being already so useless and the idea of so many more years of bitter disappointment so painful to contemplate, that I might be better served by not existing at all.

That was a worse time in my life than now. Worse, and also hugely transformative. It was when I finally understood Camus, and why Sisyphus might be happy to haul the rock uphill for eternity. In the absence of meaning– in the ineluctable and inevitable absurdity of life– the only meaning that exists is artificial: one creates meaning, or value, for one’s self, or one may choose to adopt what others believe to be meaningful. This is why I don’t believe in faith. That is, I believe that most, if not all, people who profess a belief in God are reacting, either consciously or subconsciously, to the meaninglessness of life. It’s a terrible thing to face, the absurdity of existence, and I don’t blame those who cling to an idea just vague and encompassing enough to provide some comfort against the vast, unknowable, and ultimately apathetic universe.

Kant recognized this fact as well. We are all value-givers, he said. We all of us have the capability to assign value and meaning. Since all people, acting in good reason, are value-givers, we are all therefore equal, and also possess an intrinsic value that cannot be exchanged. Whatever rules we come up with to live by we must (or ought to, at least) only consider as good rules if they are also rules that every other value-giving rational being could also accept as good. I began to understand what it meant to “make” something of life, instead of simply reacting to the horror of being alive.

After being confronted by these strange prejudices my friends had of me, I was forced, again, to take stock in what was important. I needed to reevaluate those meanings that I’d consciously assigned when I escaped from Ireland, returned to America, and set about finding an education and a job that felt meaningful to me. At the bar, being asked why I, of all people, would want to go to school, I couldn’t come up with a decent answer. Therefore, I had to, in a way, codify my life so that I could easily recall what it was I was doing and why. I turned to reason: philosophy has always been something I’ve been fascinated with, ever since I read “The Tao of Pooh” as a kid, and then Camus and Nietzsche in high school. The famous philosophers were doing the same thing I was: what’s the best way to live? What, in the end, will have felt worthwhile? What is a good life?

Those were much more difficult questions to answer. It is easier, I think, to point out what’snotconducive to a good life. For me, too much of what I see every day, ubiquitous and inescapable, is deathly: big things like war and poverty, but also the casual and mundane like cars, careers, and bad food. I could, at least, answer those questions I’d asked before. Who else has false ideas about me? Well, everyone: all knowledge is subjective, and therefore both false and true, depending on which reference point you take. Should I act differently? Yes, I should recognize that I cannot control what others think of me, and therefore act with confidence in my own plans, without concern for their opinion. Should I dress differently? Only when I feel like it. Should I get new friends? No, people give up on each other too easily. And, being a speck of nothing amidst the unfathomable everything, I oughtn’t to take myself too seriously. Am I being misleading, hypocritical, pretentious?

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then, I contradict myself.

I am large, I contain multitudes.

There is no meaning of life. All that can be asked is, “what does it take to have a good life?” As an animal, I think the answer to this is, in no particular order: to sleep, to eat, to play, to fuck, to work. Human rights are the collective name for the liberty to do each as one sees fit without infringing on the rights of any other individual to do the same.