William's Words: The Three-peat

  Ever since I can remember, I have been afraid of snakes. I couldn’t tell you why that is. I mean, I know that I am afraid of snakes, but I have no idea what caused the fear to take root. Some itch in my monkey brain, I supposed. I think everyone secretly is afraid of at least one animal. Most people are afraid of animals like sharks, spiders, or some variety of large cat, because the reaction to avoid them helps us from an evolutionary perspective (“not dying” seems to be one of the most useful traits a species can have). But I’m not afraid of other animals the same way I am snakes; snakes hold a unique hatred in my heart.  Nothing about a snake makes “sense”. Snakes are so fully dissimilar from anything else that their differences aren’t cute, they’re downright disturbing. Every animal I can think of uses some sort of appendages to aid with locomotion: humans and mammals use legs, fish use fins, birds use wings, etc. Even the weirdos of the animal world, like crabs, mol...

  Absurdism is the belief that the human search for meaning in the universe is pointless because the universe lacks an inherent meaning (is fundamentally “absurd”), and therefore any search for meaning is at odds with the universe. Thus, one must accept the futility and meaninglessness of one’s existence to truly begin to find a meaning in it. I’ve always been comforted by these ideas. Absurdism is brutally simplistic in nature, yet resonates with me in a way that other mid-20th century “life has no meaning” schools of thought don’t (the various flavors of existentialism and nihilism).  I frequently find myself describing my own life as “bizarre and kafkaesque”, a description I don’t believe is that large of an exaggeration. The late teenage years are an inherently liminal part of one’s life, as we now all find ourselves in the midst of college applications and the last year of grade school education (sorry to any juniors reading this, you’ve got a bit to go still). Each e...