Riddle Me This Batman

Riddle me this batman. What is this life all about? Why are we here? It seems all a waste of time to run around and act all important and then to die. What do we have to offer? Why do any of this if we are only dead meat on the hoof? There seems to be no meaning to anything. Every year I watch as 400 plus children make their rite of passage into adulthood, for what: to work for 40 years with no guarantee of healthcare or a decent retirement or stuff or the lack of stuff.

It makes me question everything that I have held as important. What is there to parenthood? Marriage? Work? To know that all I am going to do is die and someone else is going to rise up in my place as I rose up in someone else’s place can be unnerving. That is the cycle of life. Really, it is the cycle of meaninglessness. We give life meaning with things. Things that we accumulate. Things that we have to see and feel. We work and work for this stuff. When the stuff is not enough, what next?

Look to today. Go no farther. Do not plan for a future. It will drive you crazy. We are trapped in the material world as Madonna so aptly put it. Future means nothing until it is upon you. You can work, save and do it all correctly and never see the fruits of your labors. The future can be stolen in the blink of an eye. 

What is there to show for my father after his death? Nothing of substance. What about my grandfathers? Nothing. Grandmothers?  Nothing. What is the point of living if you are not living for today? Tomorrow will never come. No one is going to worry about yesterday when they are worrying about tomorrow and too often forget about today.

Today, we put everything in a cloud. Life exists in a transcendental world of servers using 1s and 0s. In a blink of an eye this information can vanish just as we do. Time has no friends. It marches on regardless of our personal desires. It evaporates all in its way.

I look around and see a temporal world that only believes in change and that change too often throws away the past. It is beholden to a tomorrow that will never come and a yesterday that is all but forgotten. There is hell to pay when you never play the game that runs in the present. A present that has no memory except what we give it, and when we die, that memory is extinguished like our presence.

Life is all the same no matter the scale. It can be as simple as putting the dishes put away correctly or cleaning bathrooms or as complex as billion dollar mergers. All the same in the end. It is all destiny. We are destined to die. We are destined to fill our time until we die. This is not morose. It is fact. What are you to do with your time between birth and death? You can get no more elemental than that. That is the only fact that matters. Most philosophers filled their time with meaningless hyperbole. What is your destiny?

Are you going to spend your time trying to justify your existence only to die like the rest of us? What are you about? Are you going to dance the dance of death or life? It is up to you. You can let the world drive by or you can get in the fast lane. No matter what you chose, it matters not. You will die, and if you are remembered, it will be a caricature of your life. Make time meaningful for yourself in the present. That is all that matters.

Rock on.