The worst juice machine you can get!

if you look at it, run your logic all the way down the line, you come up with something pretty awful and bleak.

sadly, once you start this process, it is hard to stop it. existential enui is like a juice-omatic. it is noisy, it is sharp, it grinds down everything you throw at it. worse still, it does not come with an off switch.

how we learn and came by this horrid purchase i do not know. but it hurts and drives us insane, if we let it rumble on..

but , THAT WAS NOT THE QUESTION!

the question is how we find a balance between the necessities and requirments of actually living our lives while still having that deconstruction-juiceomatic pounding away at the background, turning our peace of mind to a pulpy mess.

it's hard, I'll tell you. as i said, that juice machine has no off button. in fact, it only gets noisier if you try to shut it down. and even if you could turn that existential enui off, would you like the person you would become? a dumbed down, reptillian jerk who only has pragmatics and needs on his mind...

art, music, symblic thought are the handy pearing knife and icecle mold that were thrown in with this deal.

so we can't labotomize. or shouldn't.

balancing the juice-omatic with real life gets hard. sometimes, all it takes is a little moment if hardship, to throw that gizmo into high-speed blend. it feeds on our bitterness and fears, and brings us a adaquately bitter , pitch-black smoothy.

again, how then do we balance it out?

my.friends, here we have massive amounts of constructive work to do, and thankfully, much has already been done. millions of people have had this question and millions more will have it.

they have ideas for you. i've written often about this myself, but today, i feel lazy.

you probably know the advice youre going get anyway.

these pieces of wisdome are not part of a unified , all inclusive, all solving scheme. the juicer grinds those down easy enough.

I suggest, then, that you lose hope of ever completely silencing the existential doubt. it will come and hurt , but it will pass. learning to refocus your thoughts, finding comfort in other people or taking descisive action tend to help. they are topical remedies, relieving only mild symptoms.

i'll end this by telling you a story out of my pathetic experience.

when i was in collage, i took a course about chinese philosophy. my professor was often drenched in my existential-juice related questions. he would smile patiently, during office hours, as i went through the list of questions he asked me to make, just to get work done in class.

one day, he told me: you know what? maybe you can try and build your own philosophy. go through your notes,.memories reasoning, and thoughts and try to make something that you can use. some kind of frame. " i was excited. it never occured to me to write my own philosophy. I foolishly went ahead with his idea. i thought and scribbled and thought some more. soon enough, i got depressed, i ate too much. you see, it all fails in the end. there is nothing uniform i can say about everything. I could makevstatments that i saw as thevtruth, butvthey jeld contradictions and conflicted with each other. in the end, i realized that no novel reasoning or meaning can i find. thrre was no historical breakthrough. better, far better minds have tried and failed.

finally , i go to him, my teacher, frustrated and report of my failure. i tell him i can only come up with simple, unsatisfying bullet points. something that belongs in a self help pamphlet. (not even a book!)

he smiles through all of that , not out of amusment, but out of sympathy.

and he says seremoneously "well...I'm impressed"

we start laughing.

here's what i got.

the bullet points are all i got. the 'be kind to others', 'do constructive stuff' crap. everyone knows that. it is not satisfying but it is the real truth. what we humans can get at.

but, take a second look, and see something. something beautiful and wise:

all of this running around , all my work, all the situation of sitting with my professor in his tiny office, surrounded by papers and books...AND WE ARE LAUGHING! take this moment , and laugh too. that will help balance things.