As I settle down into my mid-twenties, with college becoming ever more distant and the vagaries of 'real-life' looming on the horizon, I find myself increasingly distracted by my tendency to overanalyze both external events and my own reactions to them. It's far too easy to find patterns in life, to take vague shifts in the flow of a stream and anticipate tidalwaves. One might think that taking stock of one's self would be a healthy exercise occasionally, but insecurity and depression thrive on the mana that is a self-absorbed mind.
Recently, I've made the acquaintance of a woman whose ideas on the subject have sparked my imagination. We briefly discussed a pair of old aphorisms, both of which, at first glance, seem valid and true. However, they are clearly contradictory, and despite their individual validity, logic doesn't seem to supply an easy way to reconcile the two.
- Ignorance is bliss.
- The unexamined life is not worth living.
I suppose that a valid reconciliation would be to say that although an unexamined life is not worth living, this doesn't exclude the possibility that an examined life is also not worth living. It's entirely possible that the nature of the universe is cruel and hideous, and that no matter what you do, it's simply not worth living in such a universe. Since I don't want anyone to interpret this as an endorsement of suicide (the legal ramifications would be hideous), we must discard this interpretation in favor of simpler, less lawsuit-prone solutions.
As always, we can find the truths we seek in the purest of our literary traditions: comic strips. For the purposes of this discussion, let's use the characters of Jon and Phillip as our guides, with Phillip representing the 'ignorance' coalition, and Jon as an 'examined life' type. (Note: we are discussing the cartoon versions of Phillip and Jon, not the flesh-and-beer versions. Any similarities between versions are unintentional, null and void for the purposes of this column, and strictly your problem.)
Phillip is a beer-swilling slug, possibly retarded, and almost definitely insane. His idea of entertainment is drinking to capacity and talking to cutlery. Clearly, he is a waste of human flesh. However, Philip's character can almost always be seen wearing a smile, laughing his way through daily self-abuse and a total and complete lack of mental stimulation. Bliss? Perhaps. Experiments have been conducted where the pleasure centers of the brains of rats were wired up to receive electrical stimulation when a lever was pressed. These rats were observed pressing the levers at rates of thousands of times per hour, stimulating themselves in deference to eating and other acts necessary for survival. I would liken this not to a state of bliss, but of mechanical, physical pleasure; the illusion of fulfillment not on an intellectual or spiritual level, but on the level of dopamine, nerve action potentials and flooded synapses. A case could be made that Phillip's 'bliss' is similar to this mechanical happiness, and not the pure, unadulterated bliss that is the intended goal of our discussion.
Jon clearly takes the opposite route. Locked in a vicious cycle of self-doubt and self-analysis, Jon desperately seeks a higher level of happiness, but ends up tripping over his own desperation. It is the intensity of his search which invariably causes the paranoia and depression which kill his chances for finding bliss. A mere flirtation with a woman at the pub might send Jon's mind spiraling into a fantasy of dating, relationships, occasional disagreements leading to fights, breakups, and a lingering feeling of loss and despair as he hopelessly tries to find a cheap therapist. In the meantime, the woman senses that something isn't quite right, and saunters over to the nearest Coors-guzzling frat boy. Clearly, over-examination isn't leading Jon towards a path of bliss and enlightenment.
Logic fails here. However, we still have one analytical tool we haven't used yet: prejudice and illogical feeling. The vapid, brainless, unwashed, ignorant masses disgust me on a purely emotional, gut-churning level, logic be damned. So, based strictly on this uninformed emotional reaction, I will judge against ignorance, and, I suppose, bliss. Long live self-examination, long live pain and disillusion. This, I suppose, teaches us that while examination of one's life may not directly provide the self-fulfillment and happiness that a life of ignorance does, we illuminati can thrive on the pleasure brought about by adopting a condescending, holier-than-thou attitude towards those ignorant, hairless monkeys.
A quick update on the status of things Goatesque: we've recently started pulling in over 500 readers a day, and since the revamp of the archiving system, we're serving more than twice the number of pages we were previously.
T-shirts are on the way; the artwork is done, and we've found someone to print them, so I'm hoping we can start selling them by the beginning of next month. Keep your eyes peeled. And a final word of thanks to all the people who've been writing in with letters of support for helping to make this strip and this site such a labor of love.
-jonathan rosenberg, cartoonist extraordinaire
may 04, 1998