Month: June 2023

Meaning.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 2 Comments

We’re told that life is supposed to have some meaning. Some goal, some purpose. The truth is that we don’t know. Because we don’t know, most people are scared and try finding some meaning in life, and that can be a lot like trying to interview an octopus.

Maybe life’s purpose is to find meaning. Maybe there is no actual meaning. After all, if our lives have meaning, that would mean that everything else has meaning, and all of that meaning would have a deeper meaning.

But what does that all mean? What do we gain from having meaning other than comfort? Why can’t we simply be?

There doesn’t need to be a point to life. Realizing there isn’t an inherent point that you need to figure out can be freeing. Appreciating that life has no inherent point frees you to create your own point, your own meaning. Recognizing that you can create your meaning, that you can simply enjoy your one and only life, with all of its ups and downs, maybe the most freeing experience of all. As the co-creator of Rick and Morty said, “everything is the meaning of life.”

‘There Is No Point: Believing there is no point in life can be depressing or freeing.‘, William Berry, LMHC., CAP., Psychology Today, October 19, 2017

I’ve been ‘being’ for a while, and it’s been a pretty full time job. I don’t really need a layer of meaning on top of it that someone else provides. I’d rather interview an octopus.

I think interviewing an octopus would be fun. They might not think so, though.

The point is that there doesn’t have to be a point. When I say that, it concerns some people who expect people to be satisfied with the mundane as having meaning. In the end, we die, we’re either combusted or buried or fed to fish – and interestingly in the Himalayas, there’s a sky burial which is not what you think. Life can be meaningless, a variable to which we assign a value.

The trouble sometimes is assigning a value to that variable. That value can change, and it often does when we’re not paying attention. Sometimes it just sits there with a null value for a while, and that’s ok too. Eventually there will be some purpose or meaning, even if it is to find that purpose or meaning.

The Tyranny of Buns, and Living Good.

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It’s a Friday, and I have an appointment that was at 5 pm that will be at 2:30 pm, so I gave myself a break from the novel – also known as procrastination – and headed out to get more ground beef, because as you know, hamburger buns cannot sit idle and I have 4 left.

I hate throwing food away, and the most sensible thing to use hamburger buns for is hamburgers. This is where that article on bias came from, as I was making patties yesterday.

Of course, this requires a stop at the coffee shop. I don’t use my name in public places for a variety of reasons, first and most importantly because hearing my name mispronounced even in a eager laborious way is painful. In certain circles, I am ‘Steve’ mainly because it’s really hard to screw that up and it happens to come out as one syllable.

The young women at the coffee shop, as you can see, enjoy writing things on my cups. I treat them like human beings, something known in Trinidad and Tobago as ‘living good with people‘. I’ve stood up for them against some haughty and nasty customers, saying what they could not, and discussing things when idle time presents itself – most lately which type of cassava makes the best pone.

It’s nice to be liked somewhere. From the cup, I present evidence that I am liked, and without pretense.

There are many in the Northwest of Trinidad who seem to be above common courtesy and ‘living good with people’. Other parts of Trinidad are better, but increasingly imperfect in this regard. I have found it enriching, despite the fact that in general I don’t like people. They’re peopley, and I’m an introvert that appreciates silences.

It’s pretty clear if you read about what I wrote regarding Trinidad and Tobago and AI that I have a low opinion of the government, but to be fair I have a low opinion of every government. Government in a democracy is at best a measure of a nation’s mediocrity, and in Trinidad and Tobago the aspiration toward mediocrity is estranged from reality in ways that could fill volumes. The people are generally good people, particularly if you live good with them.

I played with the WordPress app for Android while sipping my lovingly made coffee, and I was quickly annoyed with the inability to align my images, as well as the annoying thing about JetPack splitting off for statistics and notifications. My experimentation had me wrestling an octopus when all I wanted to do was write. Technology can help us, but it takes business to really muck things up. Muck rhymes with something, which is why I use it.

Since I’m experimenting with the desktop app at home now, I figured I would just do it when I got home, as I am doing now, and finding the annoyances with it – for example, not being able to run the WordPress reader in one tab as I write, since there are other blogs I want to refer to. The promise of, “One App To Rule It All”, has become a flurry of angry octopuses all demanding attention. This will not do.

I got to the grocery and snagged the hamburger meat and a few other items and headed to the line. I was in luck, it seemed, as one line had only on elderly woman, a pensioner, ahead of me with two cupcakes and 2 other pastries. She was laughing and smiling as she fought with her coin purse for that last 30 cents, and the cashier and bagger both assisted and laughed with her. Living good with people. Behind me, though, catastrophe almost struck as another pensioner almost lost a cake to gravity.

She caught it, and I pushed my stuff forward to give her space to put it down. She studied me, “I already paid for this at the bakery, don’t worry”. The bag revealed ‘..day’ at the end of the writing on her cake. It was someone’s birthday.

I told her that her cake was important and she would not drop it if it were there. She smiled, placed her cake down carefully, and looked to her other things in preparation even while the 30 cents was being counted.

Next up, the young ladies got to me, we cashed out and they remarked on the ground beef. I explained that I had too many buns left, and they laughed and nodded. I left with a nod to the smiling lady behind me as she began her time at the checkout. So often these lines are filled with people in a rush, intent on their own lives and not observing those around them. Today is a good day.

Upon getting home, I saw one of my favorite people on the property, the guy who cuts the grass with the help of his autistic son. I stopped, and he handed me a calabash bowl.

It’s rare to get one of these things, and it was a rare gift that comes from living good with people. I have no idea what I will use it for, but I’m sure there’s something I will put in it.

His son, a high functioning autistic, is winning swimming events – not surprising, since he has a tall frame and is always working outdoors with his father. We talked about that a bit, and came home to ponder what I could use this bowl for. No ideas yet. If you have ideas, let me know in the comments.

I passed the office, stuck my head in and urgently stated I had nothing to complain about and that I wanted to complain about that. Our administrator laughed, I wished her a pleasant weekend, and came back to the writing cave.

As Renard wrote, our blog posts are little pieces of us. They’re also little parts of our world and the people around us. We’re more than the medium or the message in that regard.

For me, I think it’s time to get back to the fictional universes in my head before my appointment.

Remember, everyone – Live Good With People. It’s its own reward.

From the Islands.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

It’s not often I switch my focus to Trinidad and Tobago, though I live here. In the minutiae, it’s always very busy with cars going to and fro in a rush to go stand in some form of line somewhere, or to drop children off to a school, or to go to the nearest KFC so they can get to the front of the line and then decide what they want to get.

There is a charm to it, the lilting accent Trinis are famous for a form of spoken poetry, an evolving pidgin that has all but lost some of it’s French Creole roots. When I grew up here, ‘oui!‘ was still but rarely used to end sentences, now replaced with the English, ‘yes!’. Language changes. The lilt does not.

This was a lyrical land, though it’s hard to see it now. Waves of subversive lyrics would cast spells over the populace, not direct enough to be offensive to those in authority, but understood well enough that they became popular, were sung, and parts of the lyrics often injected in conversation as a subversive poke at whatever needed to be poked at. There was always plenty.

Nowadays, it’s difficult to find that in lyrics. I won’t say it’s impossible, I simply haven’t heard much of it other than David Rudder, perhaps the last popular spokesperson of that world. Now it’s clamoring bass with witty lyrics like, “Wave your hand in the air!”. Such originality lost in paradise.

As a teenager, I saw promise in the magazines I impatiently waited for. I would wait for my Uncle’s subscriptions to Time Magazine and National Geographic to go visit him, as I could, and I would read hungrily these missives from the rest of the world about the dawn of an Information Age. There was promise, there was a future. Oddly, at the dawn of the Information Age, in a tropical nation, those who were in authority were afraid of sunlight. They still are. Transparency, making decisions based on data, seems like a version of magic considered evil by some.

On returning to Trinidad and Tobago again and again over the decades, I saw what could only be described as arrested development. I saw it as a tidal pool, something I wrote about. I still do. And looking at Trinidad and Tobago through the lens of the future of artificial intelligence, I see a self-inflicted artificial extinction as more people from Trinidad and Tobago will go abroad to join the global economy.

The wheels of government, when they move in the right direction, move too slow and for political reasons. The impatient world will not stop or turn around for Trinidad and Tobago, it will press forward even as I imagine political parties will try to leverage ChatGPT to stay in power – because that seems all they wish to do. Education isn’t what it used to be while crime has people huddled on WhatsApp chats sharing video of shootings, attempted home invasions and standard political nonsense.

All this nation knows is self-congratulating bureaucracy in most regards. Perhaps the red on the flag has come to symbolize the red tape.

Yet there is hope. I’m not sure where it comes from, but that’s the spirit of hope. It’s peculiar to see a nation I grew up in so hopeless, but when I grew up was imperfect too – and maybe because dinosaurs will not die the future will not come. Generations of promises broken have taught the younger generations distrust, generations of not opening the economy beyond distinct special interests has left an economy closed to all but those who pay the tolls through political donation.

But it is not that different from the rest of the world. Not the world piped into flat screens by Hollywood, or the BBC, which even ring hollow in parts of their nations.

What is different is the capacity to change things.