The Pondering Absurdist

How does the saying go, “this is not my first rodeo”? Likewise, this is not my first attempt at writing a blog. Several years ago I started a blog, also located on the WordPress platform. However, back then things seemed a bit easier (and less expensive). Now everything seems to be done using these newfangled “blocks” rather than the old fashioned way of just typing and using a little bit of HTML if you knew it. It took me a while to find a template that I was comfortable with from the relatively small selection of options. WordPress seems to be catered more to the full-blown business website users these days, instead of the small blogger (where they got their start). I couldn’t seem to find a template that did exactly what I wanted, so I ended up using this one. Maybe as I get further along into the process it will become easier and more intuitive, and I’ll be able to figure out how to add the things that I want. Granted, I could have selected several more options from the plethora provided by WordPress (for a price, of course), and had a few more things pre-set the way I hoped they would be. However, I’m just here to express some opinions, pose some questions, and generally have a bit of fun writing. It’s not worth several hundred dollars to me to have a custom image or some fancy color as my background. Hopefully the white won’t bother too many people, and maybe I will even gain a few followers. That is, if people still even read blogs anymore… most interaction these days seems to be mobile-phone based, and using something the likes of TikTok, Instagram, or Meta’s new “Threads.” From what I can tell, even socializing on Facebook has slowed a bit.

So, Pondering… why the moniker? Well, reader… please let me explain. As one ages, particularly later in life, they start reflecting back on all they have learned (and have sometimes already forgotten) during their time on this Earth. They start thinking about all the “could’a-should’a-would’as” that happened in their lives, the mistakes they’ve made, and what little time might be left to make new memories or meaningful impacts. As a lot of people age they start thinking about their own mortality, and some look back to how they were raised in a “spiritual” sense. Were they taught about the supposed existence of one supreme being or another? Were they taught that there is some manner of afterlife, or some place for one’s soul to move toward after death? If they are lucky (I tend to think they might have less mental stress this way), they will just blindly accept (some call it having faith) what they were taught, and expect that they will “go to heaven” and live happily ever after (or maybe they will be routed to the less desirable alternative, depending on how they lived their lives). However, if they are like me, a person who questions everything and who needs empirical evidence to “believe” something, they will probably start to question (i.e. ponder) what they were taught earlier in life.

Briefly, a little background information (this particular post isn’t the place for a novel quite yet). Before the age of twelve I was raised in a home when the only time I heard the word “god” was when it was followed immediately by the word “dammit!” Don’t get me wrong, my early childhood was great. I had two loving parents, I was not abused at all, and I always earned the highest grades in my class. Ours was a middle-class American family (living in California), with mom staying home to raise me and my brother while doing the cooking and cleaning, and dad working in an office to bring home the income (welcome to 1960’s America, when one income could actually support a family). I was a horned-rimmed-glasses wearing nerd and proud of it. My favorite interests were science-related, I had a deep thirst for knowledge, and I read books voraciously. It was during my twelfth year of life that my mother decided she needed some religion in her life. That meant that the entire family situation was about to change. Our family soon joined one of the strictest, “bible-based” religions in existence at the time. We became Seventh-day Adventists (SDA) and life as I had known it previously would change forever. As a 12-year-old I had no say in the matter. I was expected to believe that this supreme being named “God” had complete control over the outcome of my life, depending on how I lived it. Please consider that as I continue.

As a teenager I was expected to take everything I was “taught” in the church and church school I attended at face value, to just have “faith” that it was all true. After all, my “salvation” depended on it… that and all the things I could or couldn’t do anymore as part of this new religion. I played along for many years, tried to adapt to the brainwashing and be a good little Christian, but it never really “took” with me. As a scientist at heart, I just could not accept that there was this omnipotent supreme being “up there” watching and judging everything I did. Nobody could provide me with any empirical evidence that such a being existed. Finally, in my early thirties, after my divorce from my first wife (a woman who had been raised as a SDA since birth), I decided to leave the church and not look back. At that point I considered myself to be agnostic. Nobody could prove to me that there WAS a god, but nobody had proven that there WASN’T a god either. I learned later in life that some atheists call agnostics “fence sitters” who are hedging their bets.

After many years of calling myself an agnostic, I finally started pondering again and realized that what I truly believe has more to do with existentialism than any particular religion. Through a little bit of research I started narrowing it down even further and decided that I am a proponent of a little niche within existentialism called absurdism (i.e. I am an “absurdist“). I think that there is really no meaning to “it all.” I think, like the “theory” of evolution (completely provable, not just a theory) suggests, that over eons the Earth was spun off as space dust and became a habitable planet. Eventually humans evolved from earlier species, and eventually humans will kill themselves off due to their own stupidity, or they might evolve even further into something different. I believe that this is all just happenstance, a big cosmic joke, and that there is truly no real meaning to it all. One of these days I will even get around to reading (or more probably, listening to it on the Audible app) The Myth of Sisyphus, by Albert Camus, the supposed father of absurdism.

Okay, reader… there you have it! Now you know why I chose this particular moniker as my identity, here and on other platforms (Instagram, Threads, Facebook, and maybe more in the future). I hope you stick around, and offer your own thoughts in the comments if you feel like it. I have developed many interests in my lifetime, so I’m pretty sure that at least one of my future postings might contain something of interest to you. My next task here will probably be filling out the “About Me” section/page so that all my page links work correctly and you can see who is behind the curtain running the show. Namaste.

PA