back. / thoughts of being, in summary

I am back from taming the beast called Emotion, and am now ready once more to step forward!

my philosophical/pseudo-philosophical thoughts will all be dumped at http://pseudo-philosophicus.blogspot.sg/ from now on.

this will be where I dump less relevant, irrelevant or angsty stuff.

oh golly, it's late. why not talk about existentialism.

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There are so many people out there who claims to be unable to do what they want, because someone said this, someone said that. Then when they die they tell people they regretted not doing as they wished.

But the power of choice lies in you. Financial constraints are arguably the only real constraint on what you can or cannot do, and even that is rather arbitrary. When you do as others tell you to, are you really respecting them and deferring your opinions? Or are you simply afraid to do as you want because it will be "against the norms"?

As long as it's not anything immoral (i mean it in a philosophical sense, not what stupid social norms and law-fearing imparts on us), why not?

Think about all this in the context that there will be no afterlife. There will be no miracles beyond this life. All that is, is this life. Will you throw it away and live your life in Sartrean bad faith? Live in the shadows of what others tell you to?

People fear the loss of absolute meaning, the teleological meaning by which they can claim to come to be. But are we really just fearing that freedom from absolute teleology instead? That there is no one to tell us what to do with our lives? With no meaning conferred upon us, it means that we are free to forge our own meanings in this absurd world.

Ultimately the choice lies within you. If you so desire to shrug it off and say "well, I had no choice!", then it's your choice. But when you regret before your death, what are you truly regretting? That you didn't have the chance to do something, or that you had the chance and you chose not to do it?