Most things in life don’t need a grandiose reason.

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Editor’s note: The original author explains his understanding of the famous first world troubles, “finding the meaning of life.” If you don’t accept life, it doesn’t make sense, then you can’t find the meaning of life. This article was translated from Medium, author More To That, originally titled “The Meaning of Life Is Absurd”, I hope to inspire you.

There is a terrible little thing called “creation bottleneck” that exists in any kind of work or labor we can imagine, but the area most often heard of this concept is the field of writing.

Our linguistics are so defined in the Webster’s Dictionary:

Writer bottleneck: a psychological barrier that prevents authors from continuing to create a particular work

This is a relatively straightforward definition, but it still lacks a very important aspect. Let me complete it as follows:

Writer bottleneck: A psychological barrier that prevents authors from continuing to create a particular work, can make a person’s life miserable

I am currently being plagued by this “psychological disorder”: I stared desperately at the blank pages on the computer in front of me, and my heart rate accelerated with each beat of the cursor. I know that there are some ideas or topics in my brain, but they just don’t want to show their heads to let me capture, expand, and become smooth text. I am extremely depressed, desperate, and try my best to grasp those ideas.

But I suddenly realized something that made my troubles look ridiculous. Just a few days ago I was still in California, packing my luggage for a long trip. Just within a few hours. The magical air travel allows me to sit in a Korean coffee shop now – half a globe – but feels pressure to write a word. decades of human cooperation and technological advancement have enabled me to Connecting to the coffee shop’s WiFi just made me crazy for not thinking about what to write.

Under the contrast of the world’s overall situation, many things that make us worry may seem ridiculous. Just as we laugh at a dog who is concentrating on chasing its tail, the universe may also laugh at our efforts to promote again. We spend time investigating which iPad should be bought to make fun of it, for us to care too much about our friends. How many replies and shook his head.

But we can’t control what we look for at work—even those that look backless. Yes, we can understand that “being plagued by writing bottlenecks” is a ridiculous thing compared to “the world that is experiencing severe challenges”, but I really can’t control myself to think of the writing task in front of me as the most important thing at the moment.

The inequalities between our need for meaning and the world’s indifference to it are so absurd, a paradox philosopher, Thomas Nagel, proposed this concept in his eponymous paper. In the paper, he studied why we feel this unique meaninglessness when we spend time thinking about what we think is important.

But before starting a complicated argument, he first explained why most of the explanations for “life is absurd” are unreasonable. Here are a few of the most frequently heard of us today.

Cause#1

Everything is not important after a million years, so our existence is meaningless.

Seeing such a picture makes people feel that everything is not important:

This picture is a reasonable explanation to understand why life doesn’t seem to make sense, but what if we can live a million years later?

唉. Sorry, everything is the same and meaningless.

Wait a minute! If we can live 50 trillion years? Or can it live to half the life of the universe until its energy is no longer able to sustain itself?

It will be a very long life. But since death cannot be avoided, how do we know that what we do will still make sense after the next fifty trillion years? In fact, our life cycle can be extended to the demise of the entire universe, and life itself will still be absurd, because after we die, no one lives to care what we do.

All life lengths don’t make sense for our actions. Therefore, the limited nature of our life on earth is not the source of absurdity.

Cause#2

We are all just tiny dust in the universe, so nothing makes sense.

In general, this is the statement that I can resonate. Whenever I look at the stars, my smallness makes me feel that everything I do is meaningless. So is it that the universe has taken away the meaning of our existence?

Nagel slyly refuted this view, and he asked what would happen if our existence was as great as the universe. If you become a clumsy giant now and the universe is the same height, are you sitting on the same level as the universe, not just a part of it?

Although the burgers we eat may need to be enlarged, the meaning of our existence does not seem to grow with the increase in volume. It may be a very exciting feeling to be taller than all the stars, but this feeling is expected to disappear with the passage of time. Najir said, “Our own small and short-lived looks closely related to the senseless meaning of life, but it is not clear how to contact us.” I have to agree.

So if our limited time and small existence in this universe is not the culprit of ridiculousness, then what is it? Najir has a very good answer, but I am not going to simply reverse the answer. I want to express it in the most common (and very annoying) way of our time:

#The first world troubles.

In short, First World Troubles are complaints from people living in relatively high standards of living environment (such as the United States, Canada, Western Europe, etc.), these troubles and other parts of the world (experiencing famine, plague) The country’s pressing problems are very stupid and trivial.

Emotional packs we have all seen, and most of them are very funny. For example this:

This:

and this:

Although the purpose of these statements is hilarious, some of the “first world troubles” are actually very serious and urgent. For example, if you hate your high-paying job, because it is bitter and boring, it is a serious problem. You may not be at risk of starvation, but that alone does not make you grateful for the work that engulfs the soul.

Nagel believes that we humans always feel contradictory between the following two things: 1) we inevitably treat life with a serious attitude, and 2) think that such seriousness is very stupid and unnecessary.

The absurdity of living is that recognizing the meaninglessness of things does not reduce their importance to us. You will be struggling to make a mistake at the holiday party, even if you clearly know that it is stupid to do this kind of thing – the so-called first world troubles. However, even if you understand this truth now, you will still be troubled! This is the absurdity of life.

When we focus our attention on our own little world, every little thing will look important. The way we brush our teeth, the things we eat, the people we interact with, the relationship we have with our family and friends, the quality of our work, our beliefs, etc… all of this will become serious.

However, at the same time, we have this special ability that allows us to transcendentize the environment and notice that nothing really matters. We can observe ourselves with a transcendental vision, which Nagel calls “observing the horror of an ant struggling to climb the sand.” This confusing and meaningless epiphany of things is a human being unique. The ability, this epiphany has brought us a sense of absurdity.

Sometimes, the absurdity of life makes us fear, because it means that our pursuit of meaning is bound to be fruitless.

In order to avoid this happening, we join the organization or the company so that we feel that we belong to a higher than our own existence, we often go