ABSURDITY
Life is absurd enough already without recourse to astrology, homeopathy and other fantasies. Not only are they ridiculous but the don’t even offer anything of reassurance in the face of existential dread. You would be better off climbing into and eventually out of a nice hot bath and then wrapping yourself in big fluffy towel.
On one level the world makes perfect sense. The laws of nature set everything nicely in motion and it all just happens from there. But on another, it is completely absurd because all those laws don’t give the place any meaning and when we are dead we’re gone and haven’t changed the grand scheme of anything. But if only more people realised this then the world would be a hell of a lot better place; people would be forced to stop being so petty-minded. The gods of the Christians and all the rest are ridiculous simplistic, small-minded caricatures of ourselves, showing a complete lack of imagination compared to the grandeur and complexity of the universe revealed by science. There is no better argument for equality and morality than the argument from insignificance.
Philosopher Thomas Nagel and many others have pointed out that life is absurd. Why are you alive right at this point in history? Any other could have been equally likely, you could have been alive in the last ice age or living aboard a space station in the far future. Instead you are here and now and that is worth considering. Even more absurd, why are experiencing this precise moment in time? In your life right now? At this exact second there is someone looking out of your eyes and experiencing the world as you experience it, and that person is you. But you are also the person who experiences your life a minute ago, or last week or when you were thirteen and it is the same you as will see the world in a week’s time. Or laugh and cry in years to come. They are all you, but there must be something particularly special about the present you. Because that is the one to whom, right at this moment, I am speaking to and who is reading these words.
Nagel tried to find what it was that made each instant special of each of us. Every moment in time is just like any other and yet there is only ever one present. He concluded that there is nothing that explains it. Ultimately, it is just absurd.