Saturday, January 21, 2023

Robert Pantano, The Art of Living a Meaningless Existence ***

You couldn't formulate a more enticing title!
As our awareness has progressed alongside everything else, we have found ourselves outgrowing more comfortable, shortsighted narratives of life and moving into a realm in which there appears to be no clear narrative or reason at all, but rather, an absurdity and meaningless underpinning everything. This is perhaps one of, if not the greatest contemporary issue of mankind -- finding motivation and a sense of meaning in a period of time in which existence has revealed itself to be, or at least appears to be, meaningless.

Pantano's recommended approach is to cultivate a sense of wonder and appreciate even your failings for what they reveal about yourself and the world. He constructs his argument by summarizing the thoughts of various philosophers and writers, mostly those of a pessimistic temperament (Seneca, Schopenhauer, Cioran, Sartre). Of course he also includes the schools of thought loved by writers of more conventional self-help books: Buddhism, Taoism, and Stoicism.

I generally agree with Pantano's suggested approach to life, and I like his attempt to ground it in the philosophical tradition. I applaud his choice of thinkers, but found most of his summaries too superficial and felt like he always chose the wrong quotes. I also thought he could use an editor; for example, I trip over several phrases in the paragraph quoted above and think it includes too many repeated words.

No comments:

Post a Comment