Category: Philosophy
Today, during morning coffee, as we were talking, Amy mentioned that she had already heard “Dust in the Wind” by Kansas, which is in heavy rotation on our Amy’s Faves playlist.
Just a drop of water in an endless sea
All we do
Crumbles to the ground, though we refuse to see
Amy had asked me how I was feeling about the launch of Give First: The Power of Mentorship. I said, “Fine,” which wasn’t a particularly compelling or enthusiastic answer.
We ended up discussing ‘Acts of Ego’, which I acknowledged was a big part of the book. By definition, the book is an act of ego, and while it’s not a memoir, there are a lot of “Brad stories” that I use as examples to support the points I’m trying to make. I’ve received both positive and negative feedback on this, and while the positive feedback feels good, I haven’t yet figured out what to do with the negative feedback.
At some point, I blurted out ‘Axe the Ego’ as an effort to neutralize how I was feeling. We both chuckled and continued to talk about ego. And then Amy mentioned Dust in the Wind.
… Now don’t hang on
Nothin’ lasts forever but the earth and sky
It slips away
And all your money won’t another minute buy
I must have listened to this song a thousand times when I was a young teenager. The words are imprinted on my brain.
(All we are is dust in the wind)
Dust in the wind
(Everything is dust in the wind)
Everything is dust in the wind
I have two friends who went to Israel last week to visit friends and family. Both are safe right now, but having an unexpected adventure as two countries on the other side of the world fire missiles at each other while the rest of the world talks about … all kinds of things.
The river behind our house doesn’t care. The trees don’t care. The rocks, which have been here long before us and will remain here long after us, don’t care.
We are all just dust in the wind.
“The human obsession with purpose is merely a distraction from the absurdity of existence.”
… Nikolai Gogol (unverified)
Let’s start with existentialism.
For a long time, I’ve believed that you create your meaning during your existence on this planet. You get one life, and when it’s over, it’s over. I’ve never embraced the idea of a legacy, as I care more about what I do while I’m alive than what people say about me after I’m dead. And, I’ve always been deeply intrinsically motivated by learning, so the extrinsic rewards of life, while nice, aren’t a core motivation for me.
When I’m depressed or angry, I get nihilistic. My inside voice says, “Nothing fucking matters.” This particular inside voice rarely escapes the deep, dark edges of my brain and, when it exits an orifice known as my mouth, it’s usually said under my breath. I do find the Nihilists in the Big Lebowski particularly amusing, even though Donny and Walter confuse them with Nazis.
A few months ago, I started saying that I was an existential nihilist. Several people told me there was no such thing. Amy disliked this a lot as she aggressively pushes back on my nihilistic tendencies, mostly because she knows that I’m feeling depressed or angry when they pop out.
I decided Google would know, so a search on existential nihilism and a little link following lead me to absurdism.
Absurdism is the philosophical theory that the universe is irrational and meaningless, yet humans attempt to find meaning in this meaningless world, which the irrational universe doesn’t care about.
There are a lot of words on the Absurdism Wikipedia page so I decided to use AI to count them. I tried Gemini 2.5 Pro and it failed but suggested I try Web Page Word Counter which told me there are 11,342 words on the page. I then asked Gemini to try again and this time it said there were between 4,500 and 5,500 words on the page. I then went into another instance of Gemini 2.5 and asked the same question. This time it said there were 10,256 words on the page. I tried Claude and it told me that it hit the maximum length for the conversation. I asked ClosedAI and it told me it couldn’t do this. I changed the ClosedAI model to deep research and it got started. I asked Perplexity and it said it couldn’t give me an exact number, but could estimate it at 3,000–3,500 words. I looked at the Wikipedia Page Information and it said the page had 78,436 bytes. I highlighted the article, copied the text, pasted it into Google Docs, and did a Word Count, which was 8778 words. ClosedAI Deep Research is still going and is up to 21 sources.
Dave Jilk turned the Gogol quote around deliciously: “The apparent absurdity of life is a distraction from our becoming who we are”. I think that’s a good summary of what I’m getting at.
ClosedAI Deep Research took 9 minutes and used 25 sources. It came up with 8,227 words.
Now that’s absurd.