Pondering Life

So I was thinking about life last night, and thinking about thinking (my colleagues call this metacognitive thinking) as I have come to believe that it is better to know some of the questions rather than all of the answers. The premise I was working under was that if I had two half-baked ideas, at the same time… well ‘nough said there, I’ll let you know how it goes. It seems to me that when most people engage in deep thought they are really just rearranging their prejudices, thus it is easy to confuse an open mind with a vacant mind. The strength in many beliefs, therefore, comes from the weakness in the reasoning behind them. For example, great political thinkers generally decide upon an answer first and then set about finding good arguments to support it. Similarly, being logical is often only the art of being wrong with confidence. Public opinion is merely what people think other people are thinking. People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought that they are not using. Finally, lots of folks just stop thinking and forget to start again.

So how can anyone ever know if they are thinking straight? Or, if you think that you are indecisive, how can you be sure? Thinking is certainly a problem, and of course, the chief cause of problems is solutions. Sometimes when I think of these things I feel that I’m diagonally parked in a parallel universe, but that’s just life. What then is life, if it’s always just “that”?

I think that life is just something that I do when I can’t get to sleep. I spend half my life working for things that I could have, if I didn’t spend half my life working. You see, I have to make money, and sure there are a lot of things in life more important than money, but these things always end up costing me money too. I try to see the bright side of life in spite of this, and when I can’t, I polish up the dull side. Is the purpose of my life to serve as a warning to others? Is it just a continuous cycle of exercises in futility? Perhaps life is just a joke – one that I don’t get. Life is certainly full of surprises, especially if I’m not paying attention. I do know this however; an awful lot of people seem to long for eternal life when they don’t know what to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon. Life just does not make sense, even though we all pretend that it does. It is Comedy’s job to point out that it doesn’t make any sense and that it doesn’t make much difference anyway.

Some say that things used to be better, but nostalgia just isn’t what it used to be either. A positive thinker knows that it is better that civilization is going down the drain in stead of coming up out of it. A negative thinker believes that the question is not whether mankind descended from the apes or not, it is whether he will ever stop descending. In conclusion (and a conclusion is just the place where you get tired of thinking) I have decided that the proverbial glass is neither half-full nor half-empty, it is just twice as big as it needs to be.