YouTube, Nihilism, Existentialism, and Uncle Bob

 YouTube, Nihilism, Existentialism, and Uncle Bob

By Bobby Neal Winters

Life is complicated.

I looked at that sentence and said it deserved to be its own paragraph.  I figured it could also be an essay or a book, but let’s spend a few more words on it.

I woke up very early last Sunday morning.  I couldn’t sleep and didn’t want my tossing and turning to keep my wife awake, so I got up and moved through my daily routine which put me in front of my computer where I started watching and listening to YouTube.  I am surrounded by friends who were educated in philosophy while I am not, and I try to pick up a little here and a little there so that I am not totally lost when they start rolling.  As a result of this, the YouTube algorithm brings me videos on philosophy.

Last Sunday morning, the Algorithm brought me videos on Nihilism and Existentialism.  Somehow the Algorithm has figured out that folks who get up at 4am on Sunday morning might be in the mood for a little Nihilism. (You might not think that’s funny, but the philosophical types are rolling.)

It was 4am and I was in my sweatpants, so I wasn’t taking notes, but one of the Existentialists (it was either Camus or Sartre) was quoted as writing about the “terror of freedom.”  At that point, something clicked in my brain and I thought that I needed to write about it.  

So I am.

The human race has been changing for quite some time.  We’ve been moving toward individuality.  There is both good and bad with this. On one hand, I don’t have to be mad at you for something one of your group did to me if he did it as an individual.  On the other hand, I am on my own a lot more.  I have to make more decisions. Life gets more complicated.

There are a terrifying number of alternatives at every instance.  Do I get married? Do I have children?  Do I get a job?  Do I become a criminal?  If I think of myself as part of a tradition, these thousands of basic decisions are made for me.  I get married; when I get married, I don’t write my own vows, I let the preacher do the same thing he does for everyone else. I have kids if they come, and I get a job instead of going to prison. 

Any old tradition will have a decision tree that has more alternatives than what I’ve just described, but you get the picture: I can save my thinking for the important stuff that is peculiar to me.  

The rub is that when we yield ourselves to a tradition, we “give up our freedom.”

The YouTube Algorithm (maybe I need to genuflect when I write that down; my tradition doesn’t say) also brings me computer programming videos.  Some of my favorites are by Robert “Uncle Bob” Martin. One of his videos is about the trend in computer languages.  I am condensing it quite a bit, but he said that the first computer programs were written by flipping switches on and off. You could flip the switches in any direction that you wanted to.  

You had perfect freedom.

But this freedom was too much.  It was easier to do things that were destructive to the machine.  It was easier to write programs that just didn’t do anything.  And in spite of the ease of doing destructive,useless things, writing good programs was difficult.

Because of this, more advanced computer languages were invented that took away a lot of that random freedom.  These languages provided structure in which certain random, potentially harmful things were more difficult to do.  But this loss of freedom provided a means for more useful, long lasting programs to be written.

A religion, if you embrace it, can provide you the structure that will keep you from doing useless, destructive things.  While one can mourn the loss of freedom that comes from embracing a religion (e.g. I can’t have sex without being married, I can’t drink alcohol, I can’t have electricity in the house), the return--for most--is stability.

I put “for most” in there on purpose.  There are always the ones who struggle.  Always.  But sometimes the ones who struggle within the structure are the ones we remember; many of them are remembered saints.

Anyway, I had to write this.  I’ve got more to say, but I’ve imposed on you long enough already.

 Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. )