When I had been a child, I could only conceptualize emotions in one axis: love and hate. Somewhere along my education, I learned to conceptualize emotion through another axis: passion and indifference. Similar to the x and y-axis on a Cartesian coordinate, the two axes of emotion do not interact with each other, which is why I find any comparison between love and indifference to be inaccurate. If I apply an econometric lens to the nature of emotion, I hypothesize that the perceived correlations between the love axis and the indifference axis to be the result of a confounding variable with statistically significant correlations to both indifference and love, primarily arising from the bias the two axes of emotion are narrowly defined through an individual relationship with other individuals.
Such models that have defined my understanding of emotions thus far have not integrated an element that would account for an individual’s relationship with themselves, primarily through an existential lens. If I were temporarily to take a logical framework in attempting to define indifference, then I could articulate a distinction between relational indifference and existential indifference. The indifference that I show others is in no way similar to the indifference that the universe shows me. For one, I can perceive the indifference that I show others through its emotional effects that can be quantified through aggregate feeling defined within the unconscious of a relationship. I cannot even come close in perceiving the indifference of the universe.
Similar to the existence of a black hole, I cannot directly observe the effects of the absurd on my life. I cannot quantify the effects of the absurd in the same way I could project the growth of an economy in the absence of tangible shocks like wars and natural disasters, but I can infer its existence through tangential correlations within my relationships. In a sense, my interpretation of the absurd as truth is almost entirely dependent on faith. I can never prove the existence of the absurd in the same way I could prove trigonometric identities using a series of logical steps constructed from a library of a series of mathematical axioms. If I were to articulate the absurd as Camus did, then I would have to operate off of sentiments. And, as for now, his sentiment comes the closest to what I perceived as truth.
As with all statistical models, there exist trade-offs between bias and variance. Those are for models that can be quantified using numerical data. Because I can only speculate the existence of a model synthesizing emotions and absurdism in an econometric context without the possibility of assessing accuracy through training and testing data, I can only take it on faith that such a model would follow the same fundamental principles as other economic models, including the bias-variance trade-off. If the same rules apply to assess the accuracy of defining absurdism as generalizations about a population, the closer I come to defining the absurd through words, the further I come from an accurate definition of an intangible principle. On the other hand, the contradiction exists in the further away I stray from defining such a concept, the less I can articulate its existence within a constructed narrative of my own life.
I understand that the world is indifferent. I have known that the world is indifferent since I had been unconsensually thrown into existence at my inception, yet I would be lying if I were to say that I could fully conceptualize the extent of the indifference within the same time frame as my initial comprehension of universal alienation. Indifference exists in multiple spectrums beyond those associated with emotion. Indifference exists in such a form beyond the negation of feelings of love and hate. Indifference is not a state of neutrality in the same way that zero is an absence of magnitude. Indifference, similar to love, is a principle that can be loosely understood at a young age, but grows infinitely in complexity until its mere articulation does the word an injustice.
The world has always been indifferent to my existence; it is only as I age do I come to realize the full extent of the indifference.
Every year, I question myself: Am I approaching truth, or am I diverging from it? Is truth subject to the opinions of the masses? It certainly seems that I am edging further and further away from the lives of those individuals that define my daily interactions. My interactions with others become increasingly mundane; it often feels as if I have had such interactions thousands of times before, which I probably have if I could articulate the monotony of having the same conversations among different individuals. It is quite elitist of me to compartmentalize my conversations relative to my subjective evaluation of insight, but every year, it seems that I become increasingly dissatisfied with my previous life.
I take comfort in those authors who could articulate sentiments I supposed I created endogenously better than I could do myself, but do those authors represent truth? Their works, after all, merely offer an interpretation. But, unlike philosophy constructed around a logical framework, the existence of literature does not do justice to the word interpretation if such interpretations are universal. The artist creates a representation of the underpinning truth defining their lives within a contribution to humanity’s collective understanding of truth. The artistic construct can never accurately depict the infinite ineffability of a construct as abstract as truth, yet their attempt to do so symbolizes a movement along an asymptotic line approaching the value of infinity.
And so, even as my emotional connections devolve closer and closer towards indifference, I come closer to understand the unknown third variable that underlies all of my interactions: the realization of the absurd. But, of course, the correction of any faulty statistical model suffering from omitted variable bias is contingent on the identification of the omitted variable, and I come closer to addressing my indifference, if my indifference needs to be addressed at all. Through literature, I am coming closer to perceiving the omitted variable via the limit towards a discontinuity. And, with that note, I continue to live approaching a non-existent point.
shades of gwei 