Meaningless Progress, Love, and the Gay God (Homo Deus)

Progress, Love, and the Gay God (Homo Deus)

I ended my last post with the absurd, and that’s why I decided to use “Gay God” as the title of this post. It’s a bit absurd, plus it’s just a stupid joke about one influential book I just read.

Decent book

Progress vs. Love

At some point, me and Johannes (my dear nihilist friend) were often arguing about what’s (more) valuable in life - progress or love. He stated that it’s progress, I stated that it’s love.

“Life, humans, every individual should progress in life. That’s how life goes, how we have evolved and continue evolving, so we should embrace it, and push it further as much as we can,“ is what Johannes said. Sort of, I guess. I don’t remember exactly.

(Doesn’t matter, because we always have some banter going on between us anyway and I’ll just deal with his rant over misrepresenting his views in my blog while we play FIFA.)

I just feel that there’s no point to progress on it’s own. Progress applies to progress itself, meaning that it will get faster and faster over time. It seems to me that there will be a point where progress is so fast that there’s nothing to appreciate anymore, because whatever we’re trying to appreciate will already gone the next moment. Or at least not good enough. Many have probably read about the exponential growth of technology. If right now your smartphone may feel like it’s not good enough anymore after a year, then soon it’s going to be like that within a month, then maybe a week, a day, an hour, a minute, second… Of course, it won’t be your smartphone, it will be something better that will replace the smartphone, which in turn will be replaced again by something better.

The point I just explained is unfortunately dependent on time, so it might happen that progress will enable us to tweak with time itself, or at least how we perceive it, so we might still be able to enjoy things for a pleasurable enough time before they lose their value and we replace them with something better.

Anyway, progress accelerating to a point where nothing has value anymore is one aspect of why I stood for love. Without loving aspects of life that we already have - another person or other people, animals and plants and bugs and fish and living organisms, our clothes and phones and computers and homes, the land we walk on and the air we breathe, the planet we live on and the universe we exist in - what’s the fucking point of living this life?

(The other aspect of why I stood for love is romantic love. The happiest moments in my life have been when I’ve been in love, but in my opinion romantic love is more of a sub-category of love, rather than the grand meaning of life itself. Like it’s sometimes depicted as in movies, where love can magically cure everything. Since it’s something that has personally made me happy, I didn’t base my argument against progress on romantic love.)

Gay God

A friend of mine saw that I’m reading Homo Deus and asked me if the content is about God being gay. Stupidest joke ever, but probably caught your attention when you saw the title of this post.

Homo Deus is actually a book by Yuval Noah Harari about the history of humankind in relation to where we are going to go in the future. Harari talks about the relationship between animals and humans, about what it means to be human, and how technology is shaping humankind now and how it will shape humankind and what a human being even means in the future.

This is not meant to be a book review post, but Homo Deus has been one of the most comprehensive book I’ve ever read in terms of the topics touched and the weight of those topics. It was pointed out to me that the author is often simplistic in the way he passes through topics, yet I cannot get past the fact that it deeply influenced my perceptions about the future.

For Harari paints quite a bleak picture about the future when it comes to the division of power. With technology, the rich get richer faster and faster. It’s already like that now, but to earn profits the wealthy currently need other people to produce and consume what has been produced. However, technology is likely to replace most current human jobs (examples: in 20 years, doctors and lawyers, music) in the next 50 years, which means most of us will become useless for doing the shitty jobs and at the same time we will not have enough money to consume the things that have been produced. It might be that a universal basic income might solve the issue for a while, but for how long? If there’s a mass of people who don’t produce anything into this world and just waste resources then what’s their point?

The rich ones who will own technology (or merge with it) will not need a lot of human resource to fulfill their ambitions. They will also probably be more powerful with their technology in terms of destruction or self-defense than the rest of humankind without this technology. Will we upgrade all people? Will the rich separate themselves in a secure and prosperous area and leave the rest of us outside of it in a weird modern wilderness? Will they just kill us? Will we be like pets?

All of these got me to a weird point in my life. I have always felt that focusing on money, goals and a set vision for the future has got me stuck. Focusing on being passionate and doing a good job at whatever task at hand has been much more important to feel satisfied. Yet after reading Homo Deus, I feel I can’t just focus on the now and hope good things come to me. If I don’t make enough money, I won’t be able to influence the ones in power to use the power of technology for the benefit of all humans (e.g. making all of us superhuman cyborgs instead of doing that with the wealthy few). I won’t even be able to at least save myself from the useless mass of people for whom - if there aren’t many nice people at power - there’s a pretty good change to be left out to die in the modern wilderness.

What’s the future with technology like?

Wrapping up meaninglessness

Finding out that life is meaningless was the biggest revelation I had while studying in university. There’s no ultimate meaning to life, yet we exist in this mysterious world and are able to acknowledge being here, so we can appreciate every thought, emotion and moment we have in this world and give life whichever meaning we want.

After being part of a community where people are able to contribute to the world less than most other people (at least in terms of economic value), seeing successful people achieve great things, experiencing the absurdity of life, yearning for love in the world of ever-progressing progress, and getting acquianted with humankind’s future I can say I’m pretty fucking confused about what to go on with.

Any tips?

Meaningless Success, OG shit, and the Absurd

Success, OG shit, and the Absurd

What did my life in Estonia look like outside of Juks? Why would I sometimes rather be part of the world inside of Juks rather than the world outside of it? Why anything?

While we were still studying in Groningen, I remember how Nils told me that he sometimes misses having a job with a fixed schedule. Compared to student life, where you always have something to do and some sort of responsibility on your mind, having a job with a fixed schedule means you can just switch your brain off when you finish work.

This was something I was looking forward to when I thought about my year in civil service. I hadn’t really experienced something like that for a longer period of time. And in the end, I couldn’t say I really did.

Success. I think Estonia is a place eager for success. After we regained our independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, people wanted to get as far away from collectivism as possible and move on with individualism, a free market and fast progress. The fact that we are such a small nation did indeed make progress quite fast for us.

Modern Estonia is quite well known around the world as an innovator when it comes to technology, IT and e-solutions. As just a couple of examples, we’ve got Skype, Starship Technologies and the first country in the world with a possibility for foreigners to get e-residency. And being small isn’t something you can feel only in sectors related to technology. While studying in the Netherlands I always told my international friends how cool and inspiring it is in Estonia to be much closer to the top players in whichever field, because you can see how they’re people like any other people in this world. In 2015, me and my friend Henri were DJ-s at a party, where the main performers were Cartoon, an Estonian drum ‘n’ bass trio whose most popular song just reached more the 100 million views on Youtube. Just this summer I was part of a production team who started a project to create the first Estonian mocumentary TV-show where we ended up having nearly 10 Estonian celebrities - actors, comedians, singers, rappers, reality TV celebrities - as part of the cast of the pilot episode. The former president of Estonia is the godfather of a friend of mine, the girlfriend of one of my best friends was working in the office of the former president, and the current president just visited my organization’s office a couple of weeks ago. We really are small.

Always when visiting Estonia from the Netherlands, I was inspired by all of this. Yet, as time went by while I was doing my civil service in Juks, I felt pressured by this. One aspect of the service was just having little money, since you earn minimum wage there. Another aspect was feeling the pressure to always utilize these inspiring people somehow - you know, a lot of great people around you means a lot of opportunities to create great things. Finally, most obviously, there’s a continuous struggle not to compare yourself to the achievers around you. My deskmate from high school is the sales manager of one high-end hotel in Beijing, my flatmate Johannes produced six projects (four short movies, a pilot episode for a TV-project, one documentary) during his first year studying film production, another friend secured a job at the biggest estonian retail store chain as a communication manager, my uncle (aged 24) is now the event manager of the biggest Estonian indoor concert venue, and, of course, there’s this one guy who started a taxi-hailing app at the age of 19 and within four years was able to grow it to 350 employees in the team, to offering services in 20 countries around the world, to around 70 000 drivers using the service and millions of clients using the app to order a ride.

E-stonia

It got to me. I have to admit it. After such a performance during university - financing myself by working every weekend, being an instructor for younger students, taking extra subjects, getting solid grades, gathering new experiences and knowledge, meeting a lot of great people - I felt like I can do anything. I still think I can do everything, it’s just that I don’t feel it anymore. I feel I haven’t done that much. During my civil service I slowly felt more and more like I’m not really having that much of an impact on my surroundings. Which is weird, becaue the time in Juks wasn’t an amazing experience just for me, they were happy with what I did for them too. Plus, I did a couple of projects on the side as well, but somehow the joy I felt from getting them done was temporary. For some reason I felt empty.

OG shit. And like feeling empty wouldn’t be annoying by itself, there’s always some shit that life throws at you. Moving back to my home country meant getting closer to the OG (original) shit. You know, the shit everyone has in their life in one form or another. Connected to childhood, or friends, or health, or love, or family or some combination of those. And my life’s bullshit greeted me on a whole new level this year.

It’s never really cool when life throws OG shit at you. There are challenges that one feels are great for growth and there’s some stuff that just puts you out of balance, especially if you’re feeling empty. That’s when you feel like life really has no meaning to it. Not like the optimistic nihilism attitude - choosing your own positive meaning to life if their is no grand meaning to this world - but like really feeling like life is pointless.

All of this got me thinking that I like life inside Juks a lot more than outside of it. Inside Juks there’s joy, laughter, arts, and enjoying the small things. Outside Juks is pressure to perform and conform, worries about failing to do so, and of course all the global problems to feel helpless about (EDIT: not to say there’s nothing to do about them, actually the opposite - there’s too much to do).

Absurd. When you feel empty and life throws OG shit at you, then life feels absurd. Hussle towards some sort of satisfaction, try as you might, but at some point life still throws a big fuck you in your face. So what to do? Answer with the same.

Oooh, I love the absurd. Making stupid jokes, laughing at stupid shit, creating stupid shit. If life has no meaning then you can just laugh about it. The stupid politician, the never-ending pursuit of success that makes you feel stressed and insecure, the people close to you making stupid decisions, whatever bullshit - just fuck it. Laugh about it, work out, go party, whatever. Noone really cares anyway, right?

Me and Henri even created our own track called HVUKBOI with us in the music video acting as two fuckboys, who throw absurd pick-up lines to girls, dump all of them and stay lonely in the end, because we’re such shitheads.

haDe - HVUKBOI (<-- you can click here to watch)

Creating the HVUKBOI realm has been so funny. One part was creating it, getting a bunch of people together for our absurdity. Another part was the reactions. So many people have come up to us and asked: “What the fuck is that and is it a joke or not?”

The funniest time was when we were at a sports festival sort of thing in the summer walking around with Henri, and a girl, whom I had never met before and Henri knew very little, walked up to us and asked us: “Hey, guys, was HVUKBOI a joke or not?”

Another funny moment was at a music festival, when me and my friends were waiting in the line to park our car and I let the window down for some air. Some dudes I'd never seen before from the car next to ours rolled their window down as well, looked at me and said “Hvukboi”.

And finally, my favourite conversation with one friend of mine (a really nice guy):“Hey, Dan, what’s that music video about?”“Haha, what about it?”“Well, at first I was like what the shit is this, but then I thought that wait, this is you. You’re not like this. The whole thing is so meta.”

My friend ended up writing a whole blogpost contemplating about what meta means the way he said it. I’ll translate one part of it:“And when I saw Dan and asked about the video, my doubts about meta were confirmed, though not fully. For Dan added that it’s not meta for everyone and that some people can take it seriously, not as something with a content that is satirical or pushed to the absurd, but something joyful and relatable. And that takes us to the essence of meta-phenomena, to what makes it different from satire. If satire has been made to make fun of something, laugh at something - things that take satire forward and make up it’s ultimate goal - then for meta-phenomena the criticising and ironical aspect isn’t even separated from the object or action. This means that, like we could sense with the HVUKBOI video, meta is strongly based on the context and will express according to a person’s ability to comprehend the element of absurd.”

Can you comprehend the Absurd?
Can you comprehend Juks?
Can you comprehend Success?

Can you comprehend Meaninglessness?Next time: Impact, Progress, Love

Juks in Meaninglessness

Juks

Juks is the name of the support centre where I did my civil service. Their mission statement is the following: “The quality of life of all people with disabilities should match the quality they deserve and the skills they have.” Juks offers sevices to around 130 clients with different mental disorders, autism and Down syndrome being the most common ones. Around 50 people are among the staff members and, when I first started there, all of them were women.

My civil service was an amazing experience. There was one thing that Juks reminded me almost every day - enjoy the simple things in life. So many of the people there were, or at least seemed to be, just happy (edit: joyful). So many authentic emotions and laughter together with them, be it with singing, dancing, acting, sports, arts, working or just talking with friends and family. Some of the clients always hugged me when they saw me (although it’s not really allowed). There’s one guy who told me every day that Nele-Liis Vaiksoo (an Estonian singer) is her girlfriend. Yet another fellow told me with a big smile on his face how, at home, he likes to sit on top of his cupboard so he can be right under the ceiling, how he likes to watch horror movies (and I’m too afraid to watch horror movies myself), and how he really likes to listen to music from the Prodigy.

I noticed the pleasure from simple things already on my first day there and that’s why I will never forget the bus ride home after my first day in Juks. With every stop further away from Juks, and closer to the city centre, the buildings got fancier and the faces of the people stepping onto the bus seemed more serious. During that bus ride I realised how silly some of my worries are. I have a home, I have a job, I have food, I have friends and family - what else do I need?

Juks also offered me the opportunity to try out many different things. I was a handyman, a hockey coach, the host and organizer of several events, a DJ, a teacher for arts, a teacher for poetry, a teacher for cooking. I took clients for walks, I replaced missing instructors, I helped carry out interviews about client satisfaction, and I’ve even just been someone for my colleagues to talk to. The variety of experiences and emotions that can be experienced and felt when you multiply all these different activities with all the different and colourful personalities involved is almost undescribable. In my head it looks something like this:

By colourful I really do mean all colours, from the brighter ones to the darker ones. I’ll share one sad moment from my Juks experience, and one story that has entertained people the most so far.

Attachment. While most clients in the centre are there only during the daytime, there was a group of clients who were living in the centre - for whom it was home - when I started there and with whom I went walking almost every day. Among them was a girl with Down syndrome and severe autism. She cannot speak properly, and it doesn’t seem like she understands much when you talk to her. She smiles quite often, but she often looks at you with what seems like confusion. She likes watching pictures of her family, arranging things in her room and holding hands with one of the other clients while walking. She’s also very strong-willed. Sometimes it was impossible to stop her from doing an activity or to get something back from her that she had taken from someone else.

It was common for members of family (for those who had them) to come and visit the clients for whom the centre was a home. Many times I had seen the mother of this girl visit the centre, and always leave after a hug with her daughter.

Another one of those visits came up. The mother took her daughter for a walk and to the store, and just spent quality time with her for a couple of hours. Until it was time for the mother to leave again. She put her clothes on and went to hug her daughter who was hugging her back strongly. It was a heartwarming sight.

At one point the mother said that it’s time for her to go. She stopped the hug, but her daughter didn’t let go. The mother kindly told her daughter again that she has to get going, because otherwise she will miss her bus, but the daughter kept holding on tight and she started repeating “Mom” while doing it. One of the workers also told the daughter to let go. The mother started gently pulling her daughter’s arms off from around her, but the daughter was holding on very strong. She isn’t a small girl either, she’s actually quite strong. The worker started helping out as well, but the daughter locked her fingers together behind her mother’s back while still crying “Mom” over and over again. I went to help out too until there were three of us trying to untangle the girl. That’s how strong she is. We finally had to work with two of us to open up her fingers that were locked together, then both pull away one arm so the mother could step back, then hold back the girl with force while the mother would exit the door and finally - the hardest part for me - see her cry behind the door from where her mother just left.

It was an extraordinary sight for me to witness. The pain of the girl, the pain of the mother. The uniqueness of the relationship between the mother and the daughter - how love has been adapted to the inability to exchange and understand each other’s thoughts… At least not the way most people would in a parent-daughter relationship? The way I would think I would understand my kids? Such a specific situation that I don’t even know how to or want to compare it to anything.

That day it was part of my job to tear a crying daughter away from her mother. I can’t say I ever expected to do that in my life.

Surprise. Let’s head to a more care-free story. It was near the end of my first month in the centre. I was quite new, yet I was already accustomed to going out for a walk with one particular group of clients. A couple of days earlier, a new volunteer from Italy called Nico had arrived to work in our organization. The centre basically takes in two Erasmus volunteers every year. Someone from the staff suggested that he’d join me when I take this one group for a walk.

The support centre is located in a suburban area in Tallinn, lots of gray and old Soviet block buildings. We took the clients to one playground located in the middle of these buildings, because it has a swing. A couple of the clients started swinging, a couple of them went to a bench to have a seat, some wandered about around the playground looking at whatever they found interesting. Me and Nico were having a friendly chat until one of the clients, an older man who doesn’t speak, walks up to us. He has this specific tick (i.e. an uncontrollable action like swearing for some of the people with Tourette’s syndrome) where he rubs the back of his left hand with his right index finger, and he was doing it really fast. He looked a bit nervous. We asked him if we can help somehow, but he didn’t point to anything, didn’t walk towards any specific direction, just kept looking at us while doing his tick.

Suddenly he pulls down his pants, gets down to a squat and takes a massive shit. Nico yelled: “No, no, no!” with his Italian accent and I just looked at the situation dumbfounded. I saw an elderly woman walking towards the playground a bit further away and I was afraid she’d notice, but the whole thing was actually over in like 5 seconds. The man pulled up his pants and stood a bit further away like nothing happened. We buried the thing under a lot of sand and some leaves and just took off.

shit just got real

Despite a couple of extreme situations, my civil service in Juks was really something special. I got in touch with a world I had little knowledge about, or that hadn’t reached my awareness much. The people there - both the staff and the clients - comprise a unique world of its own. A world where people smile more, are more relaxed and where they enjoy the simple things in life. A world that I sometimes feel I’d much rather be a part of then the world outside of it. Yet Juks is also part of the world outside of it, and also inherently dependent on it.

What did my life in Estonia look like outside of Juks? Why would I sometimes rather be part of the world inside of Juks rather than the world outside of it? Why anything?

To be continued next time...

Meaningless Introduction

Introduction

Wow, I’m here. After such a long time of wanting to write, I’ve actually made it back here. I’ve wanted to reflect about my life in writing, because the thoughts in my head are changing too fast and I cannot remember all the things I’ve thought about a year, a month, a week or even a day ago. Writing my thoughts down helps with sorting them out and lets them influence reality in their own way. Maybe these words will influence the reality of others. Maybe they will influence you.

I’ve also wanted to hear your thoughts. I was touched when I was writing my blog about living in The Netherlands and people came up to me to say that they like my writing or that it got them thinking further about whichever topic at hand. During the last year I only wrote one piece of text for another Estonian blog kept by three friends of mine. The text was about my experiences in civil service. Almost nine months after writing that particular text I went to a cheese store while talking to my friend about my last days of civil service. A young guy behind the counter overheard our conversation and asked me: “Hey, was it you who wrote a post about civil service somewhere? It was really interesting, I’m thinking about opting for civil service myself.” This sort of feedback is greatly appreciated. Even more so with this series of posts since it will be quite bleak at times. The topics I’ve explored with great interest over the last one and a half years have sometimes brought me to moments of awe and at other times left me in confusion, even despair, about life and how to exist in it.

Meaninglessness

I want to start with the revelation I had at some point while living and studying in The Netherlands. I realised that there is no meaning to life. At least not in the long run. Noone knows why everything started to exist, why we are here now nor what comes ahead. Noone could choose the moment of time in history in which they exist, the genes they are born with nor the environment or situation they’re born into. Things just happen with no reason, meaning or point to any of it.

I found this idea to be the most amazing thing in the world. No big meaning or point to anything, and yet, despite all of that, I am here. There is something inside me that can be aware of being here, whatever this is and however well I can grasp its reality. There is something that can have sensations. Something that can feel emotions. There is something.

This revelation gave me freedom to be at peace with whatever comes in my way. If there’s no grand meaning to life then life has exactly the meaning I give to it. Whatever job or project or study I have ended up in at whichever phase of my life is exactly the right thing to do, because if I couldn’t choose the reality I am born into and the environment that has shaped me up to any specific moment in time then I am not really responsible for it. The same way I found it easier to cope with the negative behaviors of other people. The positive ones I was just happy about anyway, but if other people acted negatively towards me or towards themselves, then it was easier for me to accept and even understand them based on what I knew about them. They didn’t choose themselves into this moment, with this brain and body, so why blame them for it. Finally, even when I did blame someone, or myself, because of some negative behaviours, then that was absolutely fine as well. Because that’s how my nervous system had developed to react to the situation at hand, and that’s amazing as well.

Optimistic Nihilism 

(video about how meaningless, yet amazing life is)

Thus, I was more then happy to return to Estonia for at least a year to do my civil service after studying for three years in The Netherlands. It seemed like a year off to me after going through the education system directly from high school to university. Especially since university life did not just include my regular programme, but also taking some extra courses, having an instructor’s position and working in a kitchen during weekends to finance my life as a student.

For those who don’t know about it, military service is mandatory for men in Estonia. Normally it lasts for either 11 months or 8 months of living in the barracks somewhere in Estonia and learning about shooting, tactics, discipline etc. You can also opt for civil service, which entails some sort of social work for 12 months. However, during these 12 months you work from 9-5 from Mondays to Fridays and you can have a total of five weeks off as holidays. Plus you get minimum wage. For someone like me with a fresh Bachelor’s degree from psychology, it was an opportunity to have a one year long paid internship.

Back home

I came back to my home country, but I didn’t want to go back to living with my parents. We started looking for a place to share with some friends and I was generally asking around from people for tips about where I could live. At one point I talked about it with Johannes, a friend of mine that had just finished the same high school I used to go to.

“Hey man, where are you going to live now that you’re starting university?”
“Mm, I’m not sure, why?”
“I’m looking for a place.”
“Well, my grandparents have an apartment 15 minutes away from the centre. They live at the countryside most of the time, so I’ll ask them if we can move there.”
“Uhm, oh. Nice. Okay, let me know.”

The next day he tells me that his grandparents agreed and we can move there. It turned out that I only had to pay 100€ a month for the rent and communal costs and that was it. Shit, not bad.

That summer I also had a chat with Johannes about the meaninglessness of life. It turned out that he thought life is pointless as well. Whilst I had come to the conclusion through a mixture of things I had learned in psychology or just my own life experiences, Johannes came to it from the side of philosophy and was the one who made me aware about the fact that the idea of life being meaningless is pretty much nihilism.

tickle tickle

From good friends with a slight age gap we quickly became very close friends while living together. Decent apartment, cooking good food, watching films and TV-shows, going to parties together and laughing all along about the meaninglessness of life. Good shit, man.

It seemed like we will have a good year ahead of us. On the 1st of September, 2016, Johannes started his life in the world of film with his studies in film production, and I started my adventurous civil service in a place called Juks.

To be continued...