Life is..

Sometimes I wonder at this very human tendency to want to reduce all things great and small to a width no wider than that of a clever sentence.

I'm guilty of it; you're guilty of it. How many people have you seen with tags like "Love is a battlefield" or "Seize the day." Sometimes the sayings are just complete clichés. Sometimes they are poorly disguised versions of the same thing you have been hearing for years. Sometimes they are actually pretty clever, but still trying to stuff meaning into a container that is just not big enough. How can you possibly fit the meaning of life into one sentence? How can you explain love to someone with but a few choice, clever words? I use life and love as example, because they are probably the most commonly victimized concepts in this phenomena, but it could be anything, really: Death, the finance market, the bar scene, music, art, sports.

Why do we do this? There's so much going on behind every word we speak, let alone every emotion we feel or sensory input we experience. I don't know about you, but the idea that so much meaning can be expressed through a few words is intriguing. I use "seize the day" as an example. First of all, that sentence should not mean anything. It doesn't make sense, seizing a day. You can't seize a day.. it's an abstract concept, incapable of being grasped. We all know what the sentence means, though, and if read at the right time, these three little words can send people into fits of guilt, or joy, or amateur philosophy, or promiscuous sex-binges.

You can take those three words (or two for the also-common 'carpe diem'), filter them through millions of people, and get a different result each time. We pack meaning into these little sentences, not unlike a computer putting a file into an archive. When we send these bits of packaged information to other people, though, they are unpacked in an entirely different way. They are modified and applied to each person as befits their experiences, and their world views. They were generalized only to be once again made specific, and they bridge the gap between two humans, two humans experiencing the subjective world differently.

In essence I think that these phrases are appealing because of their succinct generality; we love them, because we get to unpack them and apply them at will. We love them because in our differences, we can still rally behind these general phrases, and be inspired by them. I think it's an art in and of itself to come up with phrases that apply to so many people.

"Seize the day" means different things to different people, but I think most people will pretty much agree that the day should be seized. Other sayings are less universal ("You laugh at me because I am different, I laugh because you are all the same" rings pretty hollow to me, for example), but are still rally like-minded people, even though the meaning is slightly different for each of them. In some cases, I have seen the same phrases being used to rally people behind completely conflicting ideas (think Einstein and his definition of 'God' and the fact that his quotes are used by both theists and atheists). In closing, I would like to prove that last sentence by quoting a man whose general philosophy I disagree with, even though this quote rings true to me:

"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being." - Carl Jung

This has been my latest bout of caffeine-fueled, amateur philosophy. Thank you for tuning in. I welcome your comments, criticism, and discussion points.

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On a related note, Chuck Norris is trying to sell me a gym machine. What do I do? I don't think I could live through one of his kicks...