Passing Butter

I think if people are honest with themselves, they will admit their life has been a failure. Not an ultimate failure mind you, just an intermediate one. But due to some combination of human adaptivity and sheer egoic blindness, they don’t see it as such.

Most people have resigned themselves to the sobering conclusion that the deepest desires of their heart are unattainable. They have decided that they will never have peace, that they will never find lasting satisfaction, that their life will be a never ending series of problems. So they fight a fight that, deep down, they expect to lose.

There’s a great scene in Rick and Morty where Rick builds a robot for the express purpose of passing butter. After completion the robot looks up at him and asks, “What is my purpose?” Rick says, “You pass butter.” The robot looks down at its hands as it realizes the fate that has been bestowed upon it. “Oh my god,” it says, to which Rick replies, “Yeah, welcome to the club pal.”

No one would wish for such a fate. No one would want such a repetitive, meaningless life, yet many settle for one anyways. How many people have been trying to fix the same anxiety issues for the past 20 years? Or are stuck in a soul sucking job they refuse to leave? They’re just passing butter with extra steps.

At some point one can’t help but ask the deeper questions. It’s the human condition. We crave depth, we crave fulfillment. And it seems a far more rewarding life to fail at something great, at something authentic, than to succeed in wasting one’s years on the trivial and the mundane. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy, we say, because such a fate seems intrinsically like a punishment. Go look in the mirror and tell me otherwise.