It’s late, I’ve had too much beer, and my 23 year-old cousin wants to show me his favorite YouTube video and talk about the meaning of life.

The video is by a band called Mr. Bungle: manic, circus music, the lead-singer often wearing masks and clown costumes. There are no images of the band in the video, just scenes of commuters in China filing in and out of the subway, transposed against scenes of chickens being jammed into processing plants. It ends with a sudden explosion, and a wailing figure in the foreground, flames blooming inside the figure’s mouth.

Isn’t that cool? he asks, looking to me for validation. I say it’s not my thing, it’s not how I care to see the world. Edvard Munch’s The Scream said it for me, the whole we-are-all-alone and what’s the point thing.

It’s too late and I don’t know enough about existentialism or nihilism to get into debate over it. Existentialism asks the question, but nihilism just has the answer. I prefer questions, curiosity, wonder. I’d rather be wrong in the end, and believe there is meaning to all this.

Dawn and I talk about it on the way to State College, make some broad-sweeping generalizations about young people who embrace nihilism, how sad it is they cut themselves off from other possibilities.

She thinks we may be less alone than we think, that we are more like a colony with a natural instinct to work together, to problem-solve.

For all its singular qualities, of sitting here alone with my laptop or teleporting out of a business meeting through my smartphone, it may just be social media that draws us out of our individual selves, by connecting us to others through a shared experience. I’d rather believe in the group than nothing.

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: blogging, DPchallenge, Edvard Munch, existentialism, Meaning of life, Nihilism, postaday, social media