I am going to be brief because I have been very busy working on something exciting that I will tell you all about in the very near future. For now, please enjoy this small entry.

The Nature of Laughter

We experience so much pain and suffering in this world of ours. Children are killed. Homes are razed. People starve and freeze while others dine on shrimp cocktail and relax in hot tubs. There doesn’t seem to be any justice on this little blue rock.

Moreover, humanity is faced with absurdity on a daily basis. There are so many things in this vast universe we haven’t even begun to understand, so many things we aren’t even aware of enough to not understand them.

Even our very existence is puzzling. Why are we here? Why have we developed cognitive capabilities and self-awareness? What are we meant to do? These are questions to which we have no answers.

In an effort to protect itself, our feeble monkey brains developed an evolutionary defense mechanism to all of this strife and agony and absurdity: Laughter.

Without it, one would look upon our world and shriek and cry and tear their eyes out. Suicides would happen en masse. Entire populations would lapse into deep, irreversible depressions and humanity as a whole and civilization would wither and languish in its despair at the hopelessness of our lot.

However, life is resilient. We naturally developed a way to take a small glimmer of pleasure in all of this pain and absurdity.

Which is why I must remind you all in the light of the recent tragedies and the inevitable calamities of the future that we always will have laughter. Without it, our species would have gone insane a long time ago.

So no matter where you are in life, no matter how terrible and worthless and hopeless everything might seem at the moment, laugh. Because the only other option is to cry.

I leave you all with a quote on the matter from Eugene O’Neill’s Lazarus Laughed:

“Laugh yes to your insignificance! Thereby will be born your new greatness! As Man, Petty Tyrant of Earth, you are a bubble pricked by death into a void and a mocking silence! But as dust, you are eternal change, and everlasting growth, and a high note of laughter soaring through chaos…”