Al Pacino looked good in the 70's

I decided that my entertainment choices as of lately had been lacking testosterone, so I finally convinced myself to sit through The Godfather. Yes, every single male on this planet goes on and on about how this is the greatest movie ever made since cave drawings were invented, yet the idea of watching guys shoot each other for 3 hours never seemed appealing to me. Nevertheless, I felt that now it was finally time. So after you get through the first hour and a half, the movie becomes more bearable (dare I say almost enjoyable) and you can start to understand the full scope of the philosophy that the authors are trying to convey. So what did  I learn from this?

1. When you want to get something from people, always make them an offer they can't refuse.

2. Always side with the family.

3. Protecting your family is the most important thing. This can sometimes include getting involved with drugs and killing people.

4. Si tu fiul meu Brutus? aka always expect to be killed.

5. Women are naive and innocent creatures that need to be perpetually protected and honesty is overrated.

Overall, I can't say it was as painful as I initially expected it to be. However, if this is what reality is like (and I have a good feeling it is), then I am only left with this one phrase that has become legendary through the powers of 9gag and facebook: I don't want to live in this world anymore...

How fairytale stories ruin girls' lives

The theme for me is love and the lack of it. We all want that and we don't know how to get it, and everything we do is some kind of attempt to capture it for ourselves.

Romance and marriage are socially constructed ideas enforced through popular fiction, sappy romance novels and movies and not to mention wannabe rock songs by former heartthrob Bon Jovi. How can a poor innocent little girl defend herself from this assault on her senses, her feelings and her very core which with enough training and brainwashing will flock like a moth to an electric light bulb to the dreamy but also unrealistic ideals of romance? The truth is no guy will run after you just because you are hurting to stop you from running away; if you publicly declare your love for him in front of complete strangers while using a microphone and a spotlight, he will run, not sigh; and men frankly care more about their goddamn ego than about what you might be feeling. Some people say that they are addicted to porn and that after watching it they might feel sullied and ashamed of themselves. Well, I feel that way…. after watching romantic comedies. Because they enforce a twisted reflection of reality and they leave you pinning after something that does not exist. Kind of like advertising creates a distorted vision of women and their role in society, these stories create a distortion of what a real relationship is like. And the truth is that it doesn’t end with the marriage or with the two people discovering they are in love with each other. Life goes on afterward and sooner or later it becomes ugly and messy and you fight and you want to strangle each other and then you don’t care anymore and you start taking each other for granted and “I love you” becomes just another way of saying goodbye and you wake up one morning and ask yourself what the hell you are doing with that stranger that you don’t love anymore and of whom you don’t understand the slightest thing. And that is when you have to make the hardest decision ever: do I stick with it and try to make it work despite everything at least for the sake of all those years that we spent together and which I don’t want to have been in vain, or do I just pick up my things and start over again. The problem with the way that these movies depict relationships is that they give you the idea that everything is supposed to always be good and happy and dreamy and that people always learn their lessons when they make mistakes. And that’s not how life is. And when life departs from that fantasy people tell themselves that their partner just isn’t right for them and that they just need to keep looking. And they keep looking and keep looking. But it’s impossible to ever find that perfection in reality. Because people aren’t perfect. And as long as we focus on our needs and on how the other person makes US feel, we’ll never manage to be happy or functional in a relationship. I saw this one movie where this guy brings his fiancée and her parents home to meet his parents. And after a fight, the groom is sitting on the porch with his father and his future father-in-law and the advice that they give him is that he needs to decide whether he wants to be right or whether he wants to be happy in his relationship because he can’t have both. That was actually kind of cute. But I never see the same being said to women… because despite our all-mightiness, we can’t take it. We want to see humble, selfless men who are so in love with us that they would be willing to throw their life away just to be with us. And that everything will be alright just as long as we love each other. But love is not enough sometimes. Sometimes I wonder whether love is even a requirement. People have fought so long against arranged marriages because they are not based on love. But what is love? And why would it be an absolute requirement for a happy life? What about respect and friendship and trust? One philosopher once said that true love is what is left after the feeling of being in love disappears. After the butterflies and the heart flutters and the light-headedness go away. What do we have left after that? What do most couple have if you take away the lust and the sex and the flirtatious excitement of new beginnings? Is it comfort? Is it understanding? Is it traditions? Is it inside jokes? Is it shared experiences? Or is it just plain nothingness? Le vide? The sad part is that the movies that actually speak of real life and real relationships, well frankly, they’re so depressing that you don’t really want to see them. Take Blue Valentine for example. That was a painful movie to watch. But it speaks volumes about how couples can become estranged and how even your best efforts are not enough sometimes. But I don’t know one person who would want to watch it on a Friday evening. Because we all want to see the happy and positive side of relationships. Sometimes with the risk of becoming blind to their other facets.

We are all brainwashed nowadays. Men with porn and women with romantic comedies. But where is the true world in all that?

To exist or not to exist (under previously specified and known conditions)...

What is reality? What is real? Is it something that you touch? Something that you feel? Something that you know? Something that you remember? When I touch the handle to open the door, when I see my room as I walk in, when I feel my bed as I sit down, when I think about my day, when I remember the people I saw at school, is that real? Did it really happen?

I just saw Shutter Island which is a movie about an institution for mentally ill patients that is located on an island and about its inhabitants, and at one point you really start to wander what is reality and what is the delusion. I know that in an earlier post I talked about how our personality and our senses limit our perception of the world and our ability to think, but this movie actually made me realize that everything, EVERYTHING that you know, see, want, smell, believe and are willing to die for are basically fabrications of our brain. We ARE our brain. If our brain works correctly, then this screen in front of me actually exists. If not, well I'm just hallucinating.

But what is a hallucination? The phenomenon of seeing something that isn't there? But then again how do you know what is there and what is not? Because other people tell you? How do you know then that they are right? Is there such a thing as an objective reality or is the world just a conglomerate of socially accepted concepts? Take 1984 for example. If you can say that there is a Reality, somewhere out there, independent of us, then it is possible in extreme cases to have one sane person in a society full of insane and delusional individuals. So in that case, you can't count on others to tell you what exists and what does not, what has happened and what has not.

And if we really want to push things, then how do you know that the PEOPLE around you exist? For all I know, I could be making them all up and they are not here. They are just ghosts that only I can see and that populate the world that I have created for myself in my mind. But in that case, you might think, it is impossible to ever know anything for sure about, well, anything. Precisely! It's like a bacterium on a microscope slide trying to study itself. Our brain gives us the freedom to shape the world around us, to try to understand it, to try to make ourselves comfortable within it, but at the same time, it is our prison. We never realize just up to what point our brain is irreplaceable and how much we depend on it until we are faced with mental diseases (or have seen a movie like Shutter Island in my case. Memento is also a very good example of this).

And that brings about a very important and somewhat ironic point. In western societies and in Europe, we place an extremely high degree of importance on reason and the scientific method. But, as rigorous and as precise as the results coming from this methodology might be, their starting premise is an assumption that has never been proven and never will be, and which is that our brain's functions can be trusted to lead us to the truth. I know that this might sound nihilistic and relativistic to boot, but the truth is that we have no way of knowing whether that which we are experiencing is real or not. Some delusions (like the one from this movie) are so realistic that we have no way of telling the difference between illusion and reality. It's like The Matrix, but the program is our brain and the wiring within it decides what we will see, believe or act upon. Everything is just a chain reaction starting from the same stimulus, but depending on what reactions are actually happening and how they are interpreted, we can basically have an almost infinite number of variations of the same event. And I think that might be the reason why mental diseases are so frightening. Because they strip us of our last source of certainty and of control over our environment, and they leave us blind.

Have you ever had that dream where you are doing something and all of a sudden you become blind and you try to open your eyes as wide as possible, but you still can't see anything? Imagine being blind, but not being aware of it, and going through your daily life, bumping into things and hurting yourself, without knowing how or why this is happening. Wouldn't that be confusing? But if the world were so ugly and horrifying, wouldn't you rather choose to be blind and blissfully unaware?

"If you had a choice between living as a monster and dying as a good man, what would you choose?"

Edward Daniels - Shutter Island

Falling out of existentialism

There’s something wrong with me. Something is not entirely right if I’m starting to miss people depending on my hormonal imbalance. I’m way too dependent on my moods. That’s no way to lead your life. Kierkegaard said there were 3 stages in life: the aesthetic phase where you just go depending on your mood and everything’s ephemeral, the ethical phase where you live by moral rules and only for duty, and finally the religious phase where you just let yourself “fall in God’s loving arms” or some bull like that. Obviously I’m at the first stage. And it’s not a fun place to be because since everything is dictated by momentary feelings and moods, it’s very difficult to make a decision and then stick to it. Everything changes according to the present moment and while I may be sure of something right now, tomorrow might all of a sudden make me realize that my divine illumination was just pure foolishness. So how do you find truth in that case? How do you figure out what you want, when that which you want today, you might perceive as being worthless tomorrow?

This might be the time to move on to the second stage you might think. But what if I don’t want to live a life of duty? What if I don’t want to live my life according to a set of fixed and rigid rules that begin with the starting premise that they can never be broken? I mean, lying can be good sometimes, right? And who wants to make their everyday life into a boring and endless routine? That might work for Kant, but I think I’d end up shooting myself after a while.

And I don’t even want to think about the third stage. I mean the idea of God and everything religion preaches is all good and noble, but I simply cannot believe in the existence of an invisible man up in the sky. There was this part in Angels and Demons by Dan Brown (yes his books are crap for the most part, but I liked the way he put this into words) where the main character was asked if he believed in God and in a nutshell his answer was that he didn’t have the strength needed to believe in Him. I find that’s a nice way to put it. Because by believing in God, so many things are all of a sudden simplified. If not, just the simple fact of not having to find a reason for your existence on this planet is worth the time and energy spent on that belief. Sometimes I wish so much that I could believe, that I could stop feeling like the world around us is nothing more than just atoms and probabilities. A friend of mine once asked me how I could go about my everyday life without believing in God and without a general purpose. And the question is legitimate. How can you go on knowing that you are alone, that nothing you do ever matters in the end and that, when it comes down to it, you are the only person you can count on? The answer? You don’t think about it. I see life like a particularly rough exam period where you can’t take everything in as a whole without it becoming too overwhelming. So you take it one week at a time, one day at a time if necessary, and you just don’t think about the rest. Because if you do, you become suicidal. Literally.

So that leaves me stuck at the first phase with no way out. Sometimes I think that maybe I don’t have the necessary maturity to move on or at least to function properly within this stage. But what if, on the other hand, there was a time to make a choice and I missed my chance to do it? Keating in The Dead Poets’ Society says that in this life we all have to strive to find our voice and that the longer we wait to do it, the harder it becomes and the less likely it is that we ever end up finding it. I already see myself slowly slipping out of the existential crisis and, while in a way this is a good thing for it gives me the chance to enjoy myself a bit more, on the other hand, I find it scary because I no longer question things as much as I used to, I am no longer as open-minded as I used to be, and I feel like I’m slowly turning into my parents, or in other words, like I’m becoming a conventional, blasé and cynical adult who has stopped wondering at the world and whose eyes are slowly but surely closing. I’m becoming trapped by the present day and the mundane. I’m forgetting how to step out of my reality and look beyond.

Maybe I need to cut my hair. Maybe I need to look deep down and try to find the teenager I used to be and uncover my inner rebel who’s slowly falling asleep. The truth is I don’t want to grow up and become an adult. I don’t want to be settled with kids and a dog in a suburban house, with a 9 to 5 job and a daily routine of “metro, boulot, dodo”. Life’s more than that (or in any case I’m still hoping). But then again, unless you make philosophy your job, you don’t have the time to spend your days wondering at the world (the proof? Right now I should be studying for my Organizational Behaviour exam and I somehow feel like I’ll really regret the time I spent on this in two days). Maybe I should just drop out of business school and become a librarian. I mean, if there is one thing in life that I love and have always loved, the only constant for the past 6 years, it’s books. And a library sometimes feels more like home than anything else. But then again, I’m too ambitious to settle for just some crummy old job. How much does a librarian make per year anyway?

Superhuman race

As the years go by and you get through high school, CEGEP and university, the pressure put on students to perform continuously increases and you get to the point where you desperately need a reality check.

You start school, an innocent 6 year-old thinking that good grades is all you need to get through life. Then the years go by and before you know it, you have to apply to university and suddenly having good grades is only enough to keep you afloat among the masses of high achievers. But what makes you unique? That is what universities want to know. And unless you've won some beauty pageant, all the while being the president of the math club, there's no chance that anyone will take notice.

Extracurriculars have become the new buzzword in the academic world and even in the world of job searches. It is no longer enough to be good at what you do, but you need to care about your community, you need to change things, you need to leave a mark. And if that wasn't enough, you also have to network and have the right connections if you want to get into a really good school. I read this old article in the New York Times about athletes who were trying to gain admission into select colleges through their achievements in the world of sports. Now these aren't brainless people who weigh 200 pounds of muscle and who only know how to kick a ball. They are intelligent people who manage to juggle school work and intense training programs. But still, some are left out. Because even when you're the best, there are still people who are better than you.

But how do you live with this knowledge? Always pushing yourself, always expanding your horizons in every possible direction, hoping that you have what it takes to secure a good future for yourself. Another New York Times post talks about students in the US applying to as many as 30 universities in hopes of being accepted in a good school. 30??? That is freakishly insane! Besides the fact that you get yourself in debt even before you start college in order to pay the application forms, the time it takes to complete those applications which in competitive programs require long autobiographical letters and references from teachers is incredibly long even for one application.

This leads me to think, what about the normal people? Do they even exist anymore? People who struggle in high school, what do they do in this case? Or have they already been submerged in the academic ocean? Did they give up? Have they been absorbed by society into Walmart cashiers and restaurant waiters? Or on the contrary, are they faring better than us nerds by simply rejecting the system and becoming entrepreneurs?

I remember someone once telling me that it's better to be the smartest in a group of stupid people, than to be the idiot in the genius bunch (or something along those lines). Maybe the answer doesn't lie in going to Harvard or McGill Med, but in making your own way. But then which one of those two is easier?

Maybe, in the end, the problem is not with the system, because after all, there will always be limited places for a larger number of candidates, be it in universities or in the workforce. Maybe there's a problem with our values and the perception we have of ourselves. Maybe the philosophy exposed in Fight Club is right. Maybe Tyler Durden is right when he says: "You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else". Maybe we should stop concentrating on being the best and just concentrate on enjoying life. And what if you have to be the best in order to enjoy life (aka high achievers such as myself)? Well then sucks to be you...

New York Times articles here and here