Whys and Wherefores

Prologue: I added this prologue after finishing what follows. I notice this blog rambles more than usual and also ventures off into dorm-room-style philosophy. That tends to happen when still overfull the day after a big meal. I’ll post it anyway but should regain my focus by tomorrow.
 
I’ve owned my current home since 2001, and for the past two decades it has been my wont to host Thanksgiving. Relatives plus a cadre of friends numbering between 12 and 18 would fill my dining room and kitchen on that day. The friends were mostly, like myself, single. The guests know each other but aren’t close friends otherwise in a general way. It always has been an odd and eclectic mix, but everyone always got along. Besides, I have the space to host the meal and I didn’t mind the work since it was just once a year. But times change. Several of my former regulars have found Significant Others along the way and now dine with them. No fewer than three on my old guest list have passed on. Another undergoes physical rehabilitation out-of-state following a freak accident. Another this year scheduled work on Thanksgiving for the overtime pay. Two others have acquired special diets. Too few of the rest remain for the critical mass that makes a party work except in the case of family or the closest of friends. So, I abandoned my usual role of Thanksgiving host – this year anyway. Maybe forever. (A future summer outdoor grill-fest is still possible, but that is at least 7 months away.) I owe thanks to my aunt for having hosted myself and one of my cousins for Thanksgiving this year. It was pleasant and cozy.
 
During my iconoclastic 20s and early 30s I made a point of scheduling parties and get-togethers on non-traditional holidays. (OK, a little hint of this spirit still persists with my occasional equinox or solstice party.) “Why should I blithely accept someone else’s designation of a holiday?” I asked myself. “I’m perfectly capable of choosing my own dates and reasons for celebrations as is each and every one of us.” So we all are, but the trouble with this sort of individualistic – almost existentialist – approach is that it is hard to get people to show up to your party on what seems to them a random date. They may not have the day off from work or may have plans for the next day. In consequence, as a practical matter, I eventually gave in and started hosting traditional Thanksgiving, Halloween, and Christmas parties, simply because more guests showed up for them. But, in principle, I still sympathize with the views of my younger self.

Not in my oven this year

Many of us make compromises with the philosophies of our youth. Adjusting party dates is a pretty minor practical adjustment. I enjoyed discussing a more fundamental self-questioning with one of my former Thanksgiving regulars (he now has a Significant Other and dines elsewhere) a few weeks ago when he stopped at my house while he was bicycling for the exercise. (It is weird to me that a 60-y.o. is a younger friend.) A physicist, he is one of the few people with whom I still talk like a buzzed college student. We both like the youtube channel of physicist Sabine Hossenfelder and so we chatted for a while about some of her vids. Then we veered into metaphysics. A longtime existentialist, he tells me he is having trouble these days being satisfied with the precept that life and the universe itself are inherently meaningless and that the only meaning is what we create for ourselves. He said that was easier to accept when he was younger. Now he finds it unsatisfying, even if true. I suspect he hears mortality knocking – not an unusual response to a 60th birthday. He'd be happier with a better answer to Why. I recalled Nietzsche’s line that people “will accept any how so long as they have a why.” (Nietzsche predicted 20th century secular political fanaticism, by the way, for this reason.) Religious folk do not have this problem, of course, but we all believe or disbelieve what we must.
 
I’ve been an atheist since the 8^th grade. (An episcopal priest, of all people, at my prep school back then correctly pointed out to me some contradictions in my thinking, though he might have expected me to resolve them another way.) I then discovered Objectivism, which served for a while as a secular philosophy since it is coherent and consistent if you accept certain premises; however, those premises, while reasonable, are still arbitrary as I was well aware. By the time I was in college I stopped ignoring this, embraced arbitrariness, and became an existentialist instead. Unlike my physicist friend, I still don’t have a problem with existentialist precepts even though I’m a decade older with mortality a good deal closer. We didn’t resolve anything of course, but it was pleasant just to BS in this late-night-dorm-room kind of way again.
 
So, is there an inherent meaning in anything? I doubt it. But that’s OK. Life is good (for the most part) anyway. And this year I’m thankful for not having to clean up after Thanksgiving.
 
For the musical attachment I almost went with the existential angst of Janis Joplin’s Kozmic Blues simply because I like Janis, but this number from Hair probably fits the topic better.
 

Original Broadway cast of Hair – Where Do I Go?