My boss just took me to lunch because the Red Sox clinched the division last Friday (woooooooo!!!!!!!) and he is, tragically, a Yankees fan. He’s an interesting guy; a little skeezy, with beady blue eyes… the kind of boss you wouldn’t want to get caught in the coat closet with at the company Christmas party, because dodging his alcohol-induced advances would mean his impaired reflexes would ultimately land him in a sea of pea coats and Armani jackets while you dashed towards the safety of coworkers, pigs-in-a-blanket and cheap wine. And let’s face it, the last thing you need on the following Monday is THAT world of awkwardness. However, he’s not afraid to speak his mind and say what he really thinks about anything and everything (classic New England/New Yorker), which I love in people. It always makes for interesting conversation.
So we’re at lunch and he’s already berated one of his fellow managing principals (though every word was deserved; the man is a complete nut job, knows it, and takes it out on everyone else in the office- and his wife- for all of us to hear) and our corporate office as a whole. All of a sudden he looks at me and says, “Do you know who Alexander Hamilton was?” And like every other idiot American who hasn’t thought about the dead presidents since grade school, I said, “He was one of the presidents, right?” I knew he was from the John Adams/George Washington era, and signed the Declaration of Independence and was one of the founding fathers and whatnot, so I just assumed he had rocked the prez thing at some point. Not so much.
Anyhoo, Bossman’s point was that we are all so completely insignificant that we’re basically already dead. (This knowledge already scares the shit out of me and keeps me up at night…) But what he was trying to say was, if someone THAT important isn’t even remembered (correctly), who the hell am I? Is anyone? And only once you realize that NOTHING matters in your insignificant blink of a life, can you be set free, and truly be happy. And while I know this, or know it extrinsically and am trying to absorb it intrinsically as I grow up, it’s always good to have it reaffirmed from someone older and wiser, so that I can internalize it just a little bit more. If we are nothing, we have nothing to lose… death is not just inevitable, it may as well have already happened. Basically, ain’t no thing, so take it easy, don’t worry, be happy… okay, well now I’m off on a Jamaican-feel-good-mon-songs-tangent, so I’ll wrap it up before I go too far. It’s just good to refresh my perspective every once in a while, so thanks, Bossman.
In the words of Red (aka Morgan Freeman) of Shawshank Redemption: “Get busy livin’, or get busy dyin’.”
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Agreed 100% In fact, the entire school of existential philosophy made famous and also quite amazing by Jean-Paul Sartre agrees as well with you. That life is absurd and without an exit or heaven is precisely what liberates us, because everything is within our realm of decision making. Hate your job? Fuck you, I quit. Hate your wife? Fuck you, I am leaving. Like to eat ice cream all day and night? Fuck you, I am a fat and happy mammal. We are doomed to freedom as Satre puts it. But the doom part is up to us to change.