Philosophy: John Cusack Explains It All

I was watching a John Cusack movie the other day, and like a lot of John Cusack movies it also costarred Joan Cusack. Seriously, I get they're related but she's scary looking. I digress though. Like many John Cusack movies, Martian Child has scenes of the actor waxing philosophical about life and how it works. In this particular movie is a scene in which John is speaking to his adopted son about his problem with thinking that he is a Martian. The means in which he uses to convince his son to stop thinking he's an extra-terrestial struck me as pretty heady for a six year old boy, but it got me thinking. It's very poetic so in the interest of not mucking it up with my paraphrasing I'm just going to post up the word-for-word:

Dennis, can I just say one last thing about Mars? - which may be strange coming from a Science-Fiction writer - But right now, you and me here, put together entirely of atoms, sitting on this round rock with a core of liquid iron, held down by this force that seems to trouble you, called gravity, all the while spinning around the sun at 67,000 miles an hour and whizzing through the milkyway at 600,000 miles an hour in a universe that very well may be chasing its own tail at the speed of light; And amidst all this frantic activity, fully cognisant of our own eminent demise - which is our own pretty way of saying we all know we're gonna die - We reach out to one another. Sometimes for the sake of vanity, sometimes for reasons you're not old enough to understand yet, but a lot of the time we just reach out and expect nothing in return. Isn't that strange? Isn't that weird? Isn't that weird enough? The heck do ya need to be from Mars for?

In the context of the movie it works very well. Personally, I feel like it speaks to a much more intrinsic and basic understanding of the human condition - a topic I have been increasingly interested in over the last few months. The thing I like most about the above speech though is that it does not offer any answers. It's content to simply lay it out how it is. In a universe in which our existence very well may be a product of random chance, we as humans do things everyday that in the most basic rational sense do not coalesce with the enormity of the circumstances of our actuality. The implications of this thought process caused me to put in context a lot of the things in life that we may take for granted.

First among the many thoughts that I had was the idea of 'growing up' - something that from a young age we are aware that we will do, but never get a clear idea on how to make happen. I'm speaking here about the figurative growing up, and not the literal aging and growing we do as part of being alive. So what is 'growing up', really? In the grand scheme of things it's really only a perfunctory title we apply to ourselves to reassure us that we're living life correctly. Of course this doesn't mean that 'growing up' in a greater, more philosophical sense is not important. Maybe assigning titles and stages to our lives give context to the greater complexities that comprise our being here. In other words we assign greater purpose to our own lives in order to further allow ourselves an existential pivot point in which the rest of our lives settle around. This all flirts dangerously close with the 'meaning of life' discussion; something I don't find myself capable or qualified to even attempt to tackle. Instead what I am trying to say is that in our quest to discover the meaning of existing (something I believe is essential to the natural progression of all human life and its fancy higher brain function) we set rational parameters to what amounts to an otherwise irrational circumstance. I'm aware that this may come off as a slightly bleak outlook on things, but it's simply my attempt to pull back the ordinary focus on things to take a look at the bigger picture.

So let's analyze what growing up entails. On the surface, it's the taking up of greater responsibilities both on ourselves as well as those around us. Logically this opens us up to all kinds of opportunities to cause harm to ourselves, or at the very least make us more vulnerable to both emotional and sometimes physical aggressors. At basic face value these risks we take are completely unnecessary, yet in the greater definition of our lives established over hundreds of years of civilization, the risks are entirely inevitable. Essentially in order to satisfyingly justify our lives, we put ourselves out there against all rationality and leave ourselves vulnerable to harms and sensitivities that, outside of a realistic world, we'd be foolish to allow. But life is one which risk can often yield great reward, and perhaps it is the promise of such rewards that make all the so-called pain of living worthwhile. What is life without experience, and in the context of an existence that is weirder than many ever slow down to take note, is the rite of growing up a means to enrich oneself with said experience?

It's hard sometimes when you're in the moment to contextualize the reasoning behind many of the experiences a person will encounter in life - be it death, heartbreak, sadness, apathy, or sometimes even joy. A lot of the time our minds may never be able to fully comprehend the effects of these things, for many of them are only byproducts of actions and chances we've taken simply for the sake of it. It would be a mistake though to look at life through a primarily singular vision. Though we experience life almost exactly this way, the brunt of the human condition is communal. Just like life and living it are sometimes counter intuitive to the cosmic logic of existing, reaching out to others is very similar. Attachment in and of itself goes against the very nature of singular experience, but we do it anyways. Perhaps it is to justify our own actions. The approval or condolence of the fellow kind may in fact be the closest we ever get to justifying our existence. By the same token, to have another disapprove of our existence on however minuscule a level may in fact be the greatest harm we could expose ourselves to suffer.

So why do we do it? In the depressing, bleak philosophical view of life (one which I have never been a fan) life should be about staying alive from day to day and doing that which best serves yourself. There are a lot of people who do this very thing; sometimes in an insular way, and sometimes in a way that serves themselves through the manipulation of people around them. And who's to say that this method is wrong? In the greater picture it is certainly a more logical way of handling attachment and self-preservation. In the end, we live and we experience because life is too weird not to. We're all going to be okay because life will always adjust. All we have to do is figure out what we want to do when it does. Like John Cusack said, we're all just molecules roughly hewn together spinning around a universe chasing its own tail and in the end isn't that profound enough to justify almost anything we do with the time we have?