If you even got past the title, which was an actual question posed in one of my philosophy classes - congratulations, I salute you. 

Now, for a while I kind of just wrote it off as some goatee-sporting egotistical jerk trying to sound smart because there are few things he enjoys more than the sound of his own voice.  But now I think I can finally offer, or at least propose some kind of response as to why man cannot in fact move faster than time, namely because its impossible, and the question itself doesn’t make sense if you start defining and explaining time itself.

Also, I would like to offer an apology to the fellow who asked this question, and apologize for ripping him to shreds, and calling him a pretentious jerk on numerous occasions, because I use way too many big words in the following post to not be considered a douchebag myself.

But hold up.  Did I just imply that I am going to define time? Excuse me while I laugh forever.

Okay, let me try to string together some poorly constructed sentences to explain my muddled thoughts on the question at hand.  Man cannot “move faster than time”, or whatever, because man constructed time - man is time.  Time, at least in the most commonsense definition of the term, is basically this… thing… that we kind of imposed on the world as a way break down our lives/days into manageable chunks. 

I remember the moment this question was posed, the professor gave him a rather quizzical look, and then tried to essentially graph ‘Man vs. Time’ (which is actually the title of Christopher Nolan’s sequel to Inception), with time being on the y-axis.  Now, clearly this graph makes no sense on any level at all, but I’m gonna stick with the following one: Man cannot be ‘versus’ time because time is contained within man.  Time is subjective, and I’m sticking with it.  It’s the ticking of your own clock that defines your actions and your plans and your experiences - past, present and future.

Anyway, I don’t know where I’m going with this, and I’m pretty sure this is only the beginning of my constant obsessing over the nature of this question, so uh, tune in next week where I say some more things about stuff.

The field of philosophy seems to get attacked endlessly and deemed utterly useless by, well, pretty much everyone. 

“What has philosophy shown us about the world today?” “What has it done for the economy lately?” “Philosophy won’t solve –insert global crisis here- (Choices include, but are not limited to: global warming, earthquakes, world hunger, my hunger, overpopulation, genocide, Justin Beiber, and Rebecca Black.)

To which I respond:  What has philosophy done for us lately? Please.  What has ANYTHING done for ANYTHING lately?! Fuck this shit.  People are fighting.  People are dying.  People are hungry when they shouldn’t be, and the earth’s crust seems to be ripping apart at the seams, and none of this seems to be letting up anytime soon.  Maybe we got some bigger motherfucking fish to fry over here.  Stop complaining about how philosophy isn’t doing anything and if you’re so set on it fixing the world, maybe you should go figure out why the things and people that are supposed to be fixing these problems aren’t, because in my opinion, that’s a whole lot worse. 

So after attending a conference recently, the topic of which was “Public Philosophy”, I was somewhat disappointed to learn that everyone seemed to be looking for the “goal” in philosophy - some kind of end, some kind of utility. 

But the thing is there isn’t.  And that’s where all the beauty lies.  It is the ultimate, self-sustaining thing.  It stands up on its own.  It doesn’t need a goal or a result or an end, which is why I was so perplexed as to why a room full of philosophy majors/enthusiasts spent the larger part of a 2 hour conference trying to defend themselves by insisting that philosophy has a purpose.  If you want answers, you won’t find them studying philosophy; you’ll just got a whole lot more questions.  And if you think you found an answer, you’re wrong.  Sorry.

Look at it this way, science works towards answering questions.  Philosophy works towards working towards answering questions.

Guys, philosophy does not have a purpose.  It is its own purpose.  It doesn’t need something to work towards; its like the ultimate perpetual motion machine.  It powers itself, and it never stops, moving and functioning by and through itself.  And that’s really fucking beautiful if you think about it.

So I was supposed to go to some party last night, and I had some pretty ok expectations of how my night would go, involving friends and drunkenness, but unfortunately everything fucking sucked instead.  I walked into this party feeling horribly out of place and every single synonym of awkward you can find in a thesaurus.  Too many people there gave off this judgmental/I’m-fucking-better-than-you-in-ways-you-can’t-even-fathom vibe.

Now maybe this is just a self-confidence issue, but I can’t be so self-centered as to think that this is all on me.  I mean it’s completely unfair for me to even think that these people are focusing on judging me, because they’re all way to fucking caught up with themselves and their ever-important images and egos.

Now I’ll admit that I’m pretty self-conscious and even a bit (a lot) judgmental, but at least I do not make the fatal mistake of thinking that my thoughts or judgments have any more weight or importance (if any) than somebody else’s.  I’m not saying that what I do has no importance in the grand scheme of things, I mean maybe it does, but like whatever, I don’t really care right now.  I’m impressed if I can get myself up in the morning without falling off my bed.  If I can get my spoonfuls of cereal from the bowl to my mouth without spilling anything on the way, it’s a good day.

Look, I try to stay aware of myself outside of myself every so often, so I can try to stay grounded and remember that there are other people with other ideas and stories and problems and lives with their own issues.  But the majority of the people at this party were so convinced that they were The Shit. Calm the fuck down.

NO ONE CARES.  NO ONE IS LOOKING AT YOU.

Can’t we all be nobodies together?

Recently, or maybe not-so-recently but recently enough, a friend and I were discussing utilitarianism.  Don’t get the wrong idea here though, we’re not smart.  More often than not, our conversations usually take place electronically, and usually consist in both parties sending GIFs back and forth, and when we do have conversations in person, they are painfully socially-awkward, and consist mostly of giggling (read: snorting loudly in public places).

Mooooving right along, we were discussing a central point in John Stuart Mill’s On Utilitarianism.  Basically, that the basis for action is doing that which maximizes happiness for the most number of people, while minimizing pain, and essentially, we are motivated to act in the hopes of attaining happiness.

How is happiness the only desirable end for human beings (or any beings but whatever)?  How can you prove that the reason we act is to attain happiness?  To this, Mill plainly responds that the only proof that happiness is the ultimate end is that we desire it.

I pondered this, and was kind of taken aback by its simplicity because, well, it made sense.

We’re both 20-somethings, confused as fuck about life, a few years into a university degree but still a few more years from graduating, and neither of us are really sure why we’re doing anything.  But we can both always agree that while we don’t necessarily know what we want to do with our lives (whatever that means), we both know that we want to be happy and comfortable and satisfied.  So I guess this whole utilitarian thing makes sense on some level. 

I eat because I’m hungry because I’m happy when I’m full.  I buy clothes because it’s a social norm/socially expected/socially imposed (and some other reasons.. I guess I like clothes) because I don’t want to get arrested because I don’t want to go to jail because I am unhappy when… I am in jail… not that I’ve ever been to jail… I talk to my friends because I get anxious when I’m alone in my head for too long and being anxious is uncomfortable and I can only be completely happy when I’m completely comfortable.

But I still wasn’t satisfied, there has to be some other motive for my actions. 

What really irks me about this whole acting to be happy thing was that it seems that the happiness part is so far down the line.  The fact that I have to think about how this action will eventually at some point maybe kind of potentially make happy frustrated me a little bit.  If it’s so far removed from the initial action, is it fair to consider it as motivation for action?

For me anyway, the use of the word motivation implies that you have to be aware of it as a motivation.  If you are motivated to act, it means that you know why you’re acting.  If happiness does not cross your mind, if you only realize that happiness will come from this after you have acted, can it really count as your motivation?

I thought about this for a while, and then it hit me – I act not necessarily to attain happiness, but to avoid boredom. 

I wish I could say that I do things because I’m trying to be happy, but at this point, I don’t think I do.  And I know this is going to come off as sounding super fucking depressing, but it’s not, I swear – just because I’m not happy does not mean I am unhappy.  I just feel like I’m not there yet, like at this point in my life I’m just trying to keep myself occupied and moving before I start analyzing things too closely.  That’s what my twenties are for, right? Making questionable (read: bad) choices (read: mistakes).  I have the whole rest of my life to look around and chill and take the scenic route and make carefully calculated decisions.

Right now, I’m doing shit just for the momentum, to keep myself going.  One day, maybe/hopefully I’ll be happy, and maybe I’ll retrospectively credit my happiness to my earlier life choices, but as of right now, happiness is too far down the line for me to consider it as my motivation for action (or at least not my only motivation).

I basically go to school because I don’t know what I’d do otherwise.  Yes, I’m there to get an education; yes, I’m there to get a diploma; yes, I’m there to hopefully get a half-decent job once I graduate, but really, I don’t know what else I could do if I wasn’t a full-time student.  As long as I’m occupied doing something, I’m okay, even if that something is sometimes-but-not-always boring and graded and ranked.

So my basis for action? Momentum.  Because honestly, I’m too scared to see what would happen if I just stopped, because I’m not ready to stop, because I’m 21 and 2 years into a philosophy degree, because I’m trying to learn and think at the most foundational of levels, because I want to know stuff, because I don’t want my mind to petrify, because I want to keep talking and rambling and writing, because… I want to be happy.  

…Crap.