Thursday, November 12, 2015

Seinfeld and Colbert "on" the comforts of our cosmic insignificance


For the past year or so, I’ve spent a good amount of my free time late at night (after the kids are finally asleep) “researching” nihilism and existentialism. Watching documentaries and interviews. Reading texts online and in print. On Monday I told this to a best friend with whom I hadn’t communicated in a few months. His response was less than enthusiastic and later that night, I immediately read an interview that essentially regurgitated the expressed sentiment. 

The book is called “Sick in the Head” and it’s a compilation of interviews [comedy movie-writer/producer/director] Judd Apatow did fairly recently with 40 super-famous comedians.

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JuddApatow: I read a lot of Zen but it ultimately makes me unhappy because I don’t want to be one drop in the ocean.

JerrySeinfeld: I do.

JuddApatow:  How do you get over that hump?

JerrySeinfeld: You look at some pictures from the HubbleTelescope™ and you snap out of it. I used to keep pictures of the Hubble™ on the wall of the writing room at Seinfeld™. It would calm me when I would start to think that what I was doing was important.

JuddApatow See, I go the other way with that. That makes me depressed. 

JerrySeinfeld: Most people would say that. People always say it makes them feel insignificant, but I don’t find being insignificant depressing. I find it uplifting.  

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Not long after reading this, I read another interview in the book where the interviewee essentially utilized the same anxiety-reducing technique albeit the terminology was decidedly more religious:

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StephenColbert: But also, when I was a kid, we had a tragedy in my family. My father and two of my brothers, Peter&Paul, the two closest in age to me, died in a plane crash. I was ten years old, and my mother, who had always been a very religious person — not overtly related to their death — would say to me — if anything was wrong with my life, if anything was going wrong — she would say, “Look at this in the light of eternity. What is this in the light of eternity?” In other words, don’t worry about this little thing.

JuddApatow: Okay.

StephenColbert And that light of eternity is another way of looking at everything. See it in the light of eternity. Don’t see this as your momentary worry. So, that helped me to not worry, and because my father and brothers had died, what could worry you more than that? From that point on, I never worried in school again. I maybe did my homework six times from age ten to eighteen.

JuddApatow: Wow.

StephenColbert: I barely graduated. I just read a lot of books, so I incidentally learned enough to bullshit by. There was no threat that anyone could hold over me. Nothing seemed important. So that made me think differently about almost everything that normally happened to a child. What are you going to threaten me with? What could a teacher possibly threaten me with?

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If I desired to be an AssholeTroll™, I could go all reducto ad absurdum on this perspective (because you can do that with ANY perspective), but I personally find comfort in the same sort of mental gymnastics utilizing this axiom of insignificance. As a writer who can think myself in circles and imagine scenarios from infinite perspectives, second-guessing myself and ridiculing my own self-worth comes second nature to me. And perhaps while it could be helpful to roll myself inside a rug and flail about my galactic meaninglessness, inevitable death, and tremendous impotence to affect human activity as a whole, I find it calming and liberating to surrender to this notion of insignificance. And thus able to decide my own values and not allow others (or my imagination of others' judgements) to yank me around.


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