Have you ever watched people dance without hearing the music they must be listening to? They look completely goofy.
Or have you been on an airplane or in a quiet waiting room and heard someone who was wearing headphones, engrossed in a movie on their computer or ipad, suddenly scream out, “Watch out, Kramer!” super loud? It’s shocking and then hilarious at how out of context it seems.
If so, then you will absolutely adore David’s post on Raptitude called “Don’t Forget How Strange This All Is.” He writes that because of familiarity blindness, we are accustomed to things that might seem strange if you were, say, an alien visiting our planet for the first time. Liquid randomly falling from the sky? People who take off their clothes and expose their skin to “radiation burns from a glowing ball in the sky?” Picking up dog poop and carrying it around in a bag? All quite odd when you think about it. We are just used to it now.
“Camus thought our unreasonable demand for meaning and sense was fundamental to human beings, and that it creates a ton of pain for us. He saw only three ways to respond to life’s absurdity: we can deny it (usually by claiming that a God has designed it this way), we can commit suicide, or we can embrace the weirdness and live in it wholeheartedly.
“The last option, he figured, was the only good one. When you stop expecting the world to be sensible, suddenly it all makes sense.”
You must read this article!
Leave a Reply