Putting "The Look" to the test of Facebook.

In Being and Nothingness, Sartre demonstrates how the look is objectifying, for it reduces my conscience, that lives for-itself by finding its own essence and meaning, into an object that lives in-itself, totally controllable by other.  “Suddenly an object has appeared which has stolen the world from me” Sartre wrote.  Indeed, when one encounters another conscience that also lives for it-self, one loose one’s illusion of being the centre of the Universe.

Futhermore, as the other is looking at me, s/he is breaking the intimacy I’m sharing with myself. S/he judges me, according to laws, rules, morality or expectations that I’m fulfilling or not. The look of other makes me becoming aware of myself, feeling ashamed or proud because I see myself in their eyes.

As I read this text, I couldn’t stop thinking about how those two ideas – the look that objectifies me and makes me aware of myself – apply to the social medias we are using everyday : Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat or Tumblr, apps that allows us to communicate and stay in touch with our friends and acquaintances at all time. Really, what would have Sartre thought about social networks and how his philosophical views on the Look can teach us a few things about Facebook?

HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE

In No Exit, we are to read one of Sartre’s most famous claim “Hell is other people”.  What he means by that is not that every social relationship is doomed to be a disaster, but that it is not the presence of the other that is troubling, only the image that they give one to see of oneself. The other is studying me with the assistance of another conscience, another experience, another perception than my own. Therefore, the other will come to another conclusion about me and I might not find myself in the description s/he will do then.

For example, in No Exit, the relation between Garcin and Estelle makes Estelle suffer. But it is not because of the mere existence of Garcin that she suffers, but how he refuses to acknowledge her beauty, thus giving a description of her that does not match the one she believes to be true.

With social networks, others are always here. They are invading our bedrooms and kitchen at any hour of the days and nights. We do not experience such a thing as “alone time” anymore, thanks to smartphone. Even when we are lying in bed or taking a shower, the others are there, on the nightstand or perched on the sink. Our phone is always vribrating because of texts, facebook messages, new tweet, comments or Instagram updates.

In a way, we are like Truman in The Truman Show: we are always watched and, hence, judged by the others. There is no rest from it. Of course, the main difference between Truman and ourselves, is that we are aware of the situation. We are not deceived. But that does not mean judgment become easier to bear.

Have you ever realised how many people exchange pictures of their meals or children on Snapchat and Instagram? They are documenting aspects of their life that others rarely got to see before and put them on display for the likes of the others– actual, materialised likes actually, almost common to any social medias. If I post a video on Youtube where I tell about my holidays, people might up or down vote me, based on the content but also the way I speak or dress. Some might leave mean comments, writing I am not interesting or a poor storyteller.

Nothing escape the other’s look and opinion nowadays and when we reflect upon ourselves, we can’t unknow those judgments about how we eat, drink, dress and spend our time. I will never forget that some believe I am not good at telling stories: I can’t un-be this self, regardless of how inaccurate I might think it is.

ONE IS NOT WHAT ONE IS

Social medias always advertise how they allow you to share “your true self” with your friends and family. Obviously, they are wrong, for using those networks is assuming yet another part. We were students, siblings, children, lovers, and friends and now we get to “be” the internet users. We use social medias to put on a show, displaying jokes, pictures, videos, quotes and songs we carefully picked to construct a precise and controlled image of ourselves. Perhaps one believes this image one produces to be the authentic one. Estelle would surely post selfies all the time to display her gorgeous self.

It is possible too that one would rather embellishes the reality: are you funnier online, or cynical? Do you only share the good music you listen to, praying that nobody will ever discover how much you like the Backstreet Boys? Are you spending hours touching up your profile picture? That’s it. You are once again experimenting bad faith: you are, in a way, what you are online – surely you do appreciate the inspirational quotes you are constantly posting on Twitter or the hipsterish pictures you reblog on Tumbr. But you are also what you are not online (The Backstreet boys lover) and finally you are not what you are online – you don’t always have snarky comebacks, you don’t declaim poems or flirt with everyone in real life.

Have you ever seen your best friend freaking out because you post that ugly selfie of him? Has anyone ever begged you to suppress that kind of photo before anyone can sees it? They are ashamed of it because it means letting others see this side of them, a side they carefully online. The issue is the minute the others will see the picture, they can never un-be their ugly self, as I can never un-be my poor storyteller self. Those posts, as our actions in real life, define ourselves: for others, we become the one that is able to be bad looking, the one that loves Backstreet Boys or the one you can’t ask stories from.

He, for example, can't never un-be the Panda that hates babies

It is a scary perspective. I’m defined by every single post I write, every single picture I am into and every piece of content I share. Plus, as I said earlier, others are now everywhere with us. The boundaries are becoming thinner and thinner. With time, there is little, almost nothing to hide away. Perhaps, in the longer run, one would be what one is online, and only that, because we will be unable to deceiving others or ourselves anymore.

Obviously, Sartre would have found internet and social medias fascinating and he would have run an existentialist tumblr with obscure references and inside jokes and an Instagram filled of black berets, Deux Magots’s expensive coffees, Saint-Germain at night and portraits of his ever-so-famous friends.  I guess he would have also tried to find a way to live an authentic life online too, something most of us still struggle to do. What do you think he would have advice? Do you think it is possible to live an authentic life online? Can we escape the bad faith that is so inherent of social medias? 

Dasein confronted to Death 

Death as a phenomenon is one of the biggest mysteries of our existence. Death is a central issue in all religions and philosophical theories, we cannot think the human being without his ultime limit: death. Many myths and stories were invented in order to explore this “world” we completely ignore. Men even tried to find a representation of death through, for example, the skeleton of death, the angel of death, etc. Today, even if human beings discovered various things , they still didn’t discover the phenomenon of death. The reason of this mystery is that no one could do this experience and analyze it during his existence, we can say that death is the end of existence, the limit of human beings as Heidegger defines it in Being and Time. However, the obsession of death   as a limit is far from being a handicap for human beings. Death is very positive in the way it made us go beyond it in different ways. In what extent can we say that death-which is the end of existence and its mystery-is a spectacular source of energy for human beings ?

Death as an extension of human imaginary : 

Men dropped their power, their pleasure, their freedom in order to have this eternal life God promised them in monotheistic religions. Death is one of our biggest fears, therefore, we can say that human beings have chosen to create ans to believe in a God that is going to offer them an eternal life just for them to avoid thinking about the absurdity of death. Monotheism offers an extension of life into a better life after death, that’s why it was, and it is still very successful : it fights absurdity with faith. Although faith may appear as a weakness of Men, it can also be considered as a smart idea men came with. Developing one’s imaginary to this extent shows the greatness of human intelligence, their consciousness of their limites and their capacity to sublime their fears until going beyond them. 

The fear of death is also very constructive. Men always refused the idea of their non-existence, they always tried to fight against death. Although no-one would be able to win a fight against death as we saw it in the movie entitled Seventh Seal. Humain beings always fought death in order to keep it away as much as possible. This eternal fight against death made us as human beings make much progress and extend life and time the most possible. The development in the health field is a good example of the numerous progress our fear of death has allowed us to. However, human beings have not only fear of death, they are also very curious about it, and this curiosity is also going to be a very interesting source of intellectual stimulation. 

To existence is to fight for life, not against death. Fighting against death is surviving 

“Je voudrais mourir par curiosité / I would like to die out of curiosity” Georges Sand. 

The mystery of death is that no one can precisely analyze it like any other kind of phenomenon. Death is not an experience that can be reproduced and that is exactly why it’s such an impossible field to explore. All these questions surrounding the idea of death made Georges Sand, a french author write the following sentence : « I would like to die out of curiosity ». We would like to die to discover this world, we would like to die to finally stop fearing death, being anxious about the idea of it, we would like to die in order to possess and hold death the way it inevitably possesses us. Curiosity made human beings wright, dream, fantasize about death and about eternity. Many writers, from antiquity to modern times, wrote about death, about what we should expect after death, what would death be like. The three holy books of monotheism generously developed this world beyond our world and its secret. I believe it explains a lot about this three books being the best-sellers of all time. 

The phenomenon of death made also people fantasize its contrary : eternity, eternity that Jesus promised to his followers, eternity that is represented by the Vampire characters, characters who have so much success in literature and cinema. This success of vampires may be explained by the fact they are the incarnation of a human fantasma : eternity. 

What if we were eternal ? 

We are not going to talk about the demographic boom in our planet that eternity can cause , but only the absence of death and it’s consequences on human achievements, their energy and intelligence. The absence of death is the absence of the ultimate deadline. Death is the deadline of existence, that is why human beings try, throughout their lives, to fight against it or keep it away as much as possible. Men always tried to keep existing, reason why they have written books, gave birth to children who would bear their names, invent something that will mark their names in history books , etc. We can say that the quest for eternity facing the inevitability of death created the human intelligence, allowed the human progress and made the human being différent from other beings.

As a conclusion, we can say that without the existence of death, there would be no existence at all. Human being is a Dasein because he has a deadline. What defines this Dasein is the way he is going to explore death, to think death, to fight against death during his life to proof his existence. Therefore we can say that existence is both life and death united in one phenomenon. Death is  the end of existence but the fatality of death is also the reason of existence. 

Existentialism and phenomenology in Matrix

If you only see in Matrix a simple blockbuster combining chases and fight scenes, you are mistaken! If the trilogy did not invent anything, it has the great merit, through an entertainment film, to address the theories of Hegel, Plato, Descartes and many other philosophers...

One of the great philosophical concepts in Matrix is ​​ the importance of choice, one that engages the individual as well as mankind. It is impossible not to choose, refusing to choose is itself a choice, that of not making choices. The essence of human life is the cause and the consequence of his choices. As explained above, the matrix must take into account the free will of man so that he could accept the illusion that holds it in slavery. While ultimately there is really no choice, since the odds are contained in a fatal train that triggers a new cycle, however the architect is interested in letting Neo create a bit of a mess by testing the limits of the equations governing the virtual world. In short, we must let people express themselves, but in a well-partitioned space.

The existentialists believe that the human is finally free and stand aside of determinism or of sociological holism. If the matrix is predetermined by functional software, the architect realized that a utopian society, product of scientific calculations leading to harmony, putting humans on an equal footing, does not work because it encloses the individual in a straitjacket where it cannot choose; at least in this imperfect world he can have the illusion of choice. Finally, we had to recreate a realistic universe, inegalitarian, competitive, violent, product of human choices. In other words, if the matrix was a video game, say the first version was a platform game, like Super Mario, where he had to go from point A to point B by crushing the mushrooms, the new version is an open world, where every action generates a result producing other possibilities... From order must be born disorder and vice versa.

Phenomenology, which would be the source of existentialism calls to grasp the essence of an object to know its true nature. So we must admit all points of view imaginable to design an object in its fullness, and then extract the essence. So there is a direct parallel with the allegory of the cave*, existentialism attempts to get rid of a pragmatic vision, it is necessary to distance yourself to determine the infinity of possible and choose calmly.

* Allegory of the cavern:

From the first moments of the film, the allegory of Plato comes to mind. This is also the main theme of the first episode, the men chained to the Matrix, his back to reality with a false perception of the real and true knowledge. Thus, the cave represents the first reading of the human being; he perceives things as he sees them, without ever questioning them. This is what Morpheus explains to Neo, making a rough reference to Alice in Wonderland. Awakened people often reject the truth when it is exposed to them; some are not ready to hear this version of things. This is also why the agents can so easily be embodied in any individual, as they cling to their perception of reality as to its shell rock, nothing else seems conceivable to them. For Plato, therefore access to knowledge required a hard effort, an initiatory journey fraught with pitfalls to decipher the truth. Indeed habits usually create certainties that make us blind and prevent any critical thinking on the environment in which we operate. The ascent is then used to move the material world, the intelligible world.

Descartes pushed the metaphor a little further, speaking of the denial of reality. It stipulates that to remain in a material world is much more comfortable than question your habits and the reassuring forms surrounding us. From a contemporary perspective, Matrix questions us about the ubiquity of the image, the monopoly of the society of the spectacle, the digital age, which interfered in every corner of our modern world and which amend inexorably our perception of reality and the influence we can have in it, just as was the religion.

Freedom in existentialism is to admit that there is neither moral nor dogma or absolute truth. The truth will be built for each, through their choices and paths. Determinism does not exist for Sartre, because what is truth is that the individual defines as truth (like Kierkegaard). Thus the Oracle never really responds to Neo when the latter questioned him and the architect lets Neo choose between condemning humanity and starting the reload opting for the status quo.

Since this is a characteristic of humans, the Neo anomaly, is empowered to make its own choices. Smith, who is his exact opposite, also became a being of choice, it is free to destroy the matrix, and nothing prevents him except Neo, also being of choice, but whose purpose is contrary, and by contrast, both possibilities (destruction of the human race by Smith and emancipation of the human race by Neo) neutralize and keep things in the state, maintaining the status quo.

Thus humans are destined to serve the machines forever. But if we reverse the problem, we see that without humans, machines cannot function. This refers us directly to the master-slave dialectic of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.

Zion adviser also admits in a conversation with Neo that without humans there would be no machines and no human without machines to operate Zion. In Zion, the machines are run by humans, outside humans are the ones alienated to the machines.

The dialectic of Hegel insinuated that the slave, transforming nature, accesses the object as it transforms himself through work, while the master, winning directly the property, remains passive and thus outside the world. By performing the task instead of the master, the slave dominates the master, because without the slave, the master doesn’t know how to get the desired object, so he’s unable to transform nature. Humans and machines in Matrix are each other’s masters and slaves. The Matrix offers to the human illusion of control, he is the slave but believes himself to be the master, however, if the machine didn’t work so that humans evolved in a context that makes it so happy and productive, then it cannot exist, so it is also dominated by its requirements and therefore his slaves, then entering a relationship of equality. The master becomes the slave of the slave.

Reflection on the authentic existence

In this blogpost, I’d like to come back on a detail mentioned by many philosophers we have studied : the notion of authentic existence, authentic life. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger used this term. I will (very) briefly summarize their ideas :

• For Kierkegaard, to live an authentic existence you have to achieve selfhood. You have to renounce to the aesthetic life ; the couch potato, the business man and the aristocratic hedonist do not live an authentic existence. You have to choose the ethical life which means you are in despair and you are aware of it, and yet you aren’t authentic. Finally you’ll experience the leap of faith and briefly, temporarily be authentic.

• According to Nietzsche to live an authentic existence, you need to affirm life, to manage the good and bad parts of it. You have to free yourself from the metaphysics, the not-inborn morals and live according to your will of power.

• For Heidegger, to live an authentic existence you have to free yourself from the addiction toward the others and live toward death, that means being aware that we are, as humans, as existent beings, doomed to death. And we should live according to this knowledge of this unavoidable end.

As you can see, each one of them has a different conception of what is an authentic existence. I quite agree with the idea that we should live an authentic life as far as possible. But what strikes me, or even upsets me is the fact that these three philosophers define what is supposed to be MY (or your) authentic life.

( Thank you Britney for expressing my thought)

I really do not appreciate when someone, even if it’s a well known philosopher, explains to me that I don’t really live an authentic existence. It is even more irritating when this person describes how I should authentically exist, how every human being should authentically live. In my opinion it is a denial of my freedom and my individuality.

Indeed, the word authentic comes from the greek word authentikos which literally means “from the author” or “who is master of him/herself”. Hence, as the master of my life, I consider myself able to determine what is my authenticity and how I will authentically exist.

We can define in a less normative and substantial way what is living authentically without denying individuality and autonomy. I would say that living an authentic life is living according to a kind of ideal which you have yourself determined. More widely, you can consider that you have act authentically when you have no regrets, when your acts match what you are, what you consider yourself to be.

I'll be sincerely glad to hear you about this conception of authentic life !

To come back on my dear philosophers, I'd like to add some considerations on their conception of the authentic life. First Kierkegaard. If existing authentically is being in despair and is giving up on being SOMETIMES a couch potato (come on I know you like it too !) or feeling bad because hedonism is not authentic life (although it seems to have some nice aspects), well I'm not sure I want this authentic life !

Concerning Nietzsche, I am in the perspective of affirming life. However, if this means to live according to my will of power, I don't think I gonna live very longer. Without devalorising myself, I don't belong to the more powerfull and the stronger people so, this kind of life is not really attractive to me.

To finish with Heidegger, I think his conception of authentic life is maybe the most interesting and the less binding. Being aware of our death, of the fact that it can happen anytime, help us, I believe, to give to our life a meaning, a goal. Just as Harold Crick in Stranger than fiction, having in mind our finitude allow us to determine a goal for our life and to try to achieve it (playing the guitar for instance). And it thus helps us to live OUR authentic life and not just being carried through life thanks to necessity (brushing your teeth, getting dressed, working...)

To conclude, I’d like to naïvely encourage all of you to life authentically ; to define who you are and what you want to be, and to live according to this, and not according to what you are supposed to be, what they want you to be. It’s not that easy.

Is going to school meaningless?

Firstly I would like to apologize. I actually wrote this a long time ago but I forgot to upload it.

Every day, I get up, and go to school; I meet some friends, always the same ones; I buy a sandwich, eat my sandwich; I sit through a lecture, and another lecture. Never did I question my lifestyle. Or actually, I did, whenever I saw this picture on Facebook:

                          

“Haha, so true”

Is it funny to be either a Nerd, a Slacker or a Zombie?

Actually, a few people defy the laws of physics, and some others are somewhere in the blank space around the schema, getting no good grades, no sleep and no social life. But who cares about this minority of people?

We are rather going to observe the large majority of students. Is it actually meaningful to have perfect grades? To get your ten-hour-long beauty sleep? To be the popular student?

The pursuit of knowledge

There is a religion common to every student who want to pass: knowledge. Whether you listened in class, whether you took notes, you just learn by heart every single thing there is to know about the subject. This method is certainly the most reassuring one. Indeed, during an exam, your best friend, your best ally, your best weapon is knowledge. The more you know the better.

But since everybody work like this, it becomes a race for knowledge. Thank God, Sciences Po doesn’t function like this.

Anyone remember Faust? This “business man” as Kierkegaard would have called him. Faust lost his youth because of his thirst for knowledge. He feels like there is nothing more to learn, like he has come to the end of all knowledge, which puts him in an advanced stage of despair, of unconscious despair.

In his despair, Faust wants to commit suicide by drinking poison. But then, Mephistopheles, the devil appears and suggests Faust to establish a contract with him. In exchange of a moment of transcendence, Faust must become his servant for the rest of eternity. And Faust accepts.

With this story, we can understand that building up knowledge without any real goal is meaningless. To be the best is a good motive but once one becomes the best, there is nothing after that one can achieve.

How to be a couch potato

Everybody wants to play Sleeping Beauty, because it is easy. But anyone could also easily understand why this kind of life is meaningless.

Unfortunately, most people do not sleep because they need it. For Kierkegaard, this type of lifestyle is a form of alienation from the Self. The “couch potato” doesn’t contribute to the society, he doesn’t care about others. It is a lower form of life.

                         

In Requiem for a Dream, the characters have no goal in life. Harry, his friend Tyron and his girlfriend Marianne are drug addicts. They wander around, not actually doing anything. Harry’s mother, Sara, is a television addict. She literally cannot live without her television. They are not alive but rather trying to survive.

Do you know your 5000 friends?

Students suffer from despair. They cannot be what they want to be, they cannot have the grades they want to have. To forget that they despair, they keep themselves entertained by any means. They want to pretend that they have a great life, a high social status so in the microcosm that is called school, they want to be popular.

But according to Pascal, this kind of life is an illusion. In French, to entertain is divertir, which also means divert. When you entertain yourself by being with others, you divert your attention from death and despair to more pleasant things. By being popular, you have a good image of yourself and you protect yourself from solitude. You build an imaginary image of yourself and others, you live beyond yourself.

Why playing the Sims kills you?

            By the title of my article, I promised to put the light on the biggest question of your sweat childhood. Don’t be ashamed, I know that the Sims, this virtual reality game, had a compulsive attraction on a great part of you when you still had a strand of hair falling on your eyes and braces. Why does the time spent playing on your computer with your virtual friends destroyed a part of you? Be patient. You will understand in a minute.

         

   First, let me talk about Heidegger, who is pretty easy to understand behind his complex words such « Dasein ». What is a Dasein ? In Being and Time, Heidegger explains that every human being have a Dasein. This concept does not refers to a « person », to the mankind, it is a quite new concept that actually means « being there ». In fact, your life has an essence, which is determined by your existence, by what you live, and this existence itself is determined by your Dasein. It is a state of you when you ex-ists, when you stand outside of your body, when you reach transcendence. It is the first state of anything, just an activity that you do not relate to words or to your experience.

Being is commonly known as reality. To Aristotle, being is a substance, that unifies people’s attributes. It is a whole of you. But to Heidegger, you are not being neither through your body nor your rational thoughts, only through the Dasein. Being is just the first step of the perception of the elements.

And that’s where comes Merleau-Ponty, who tried to precise what Heidegger wrote. Merleau-Ponty theorized then few ideas about perception and ontology in his book Phenomenology of Perception. To him, phenomenology is the art to find definitions to essences of perception and consciousness. It is a return to the things themselves, a rejection of science. And perception is « a play of colours, noises and tactile sensations » which have no meaning first, and which are immediately afterwards put back into the world as we learnt it. It is « the background from which all acts stand out ». In fact, the perception of Merleau-Ponty is the Dasein of Heidegger. The perception is an access to the truth whereas the experience of the real is imaginary. Science is just an interpretation of the world, like everyone has his own view of the world because of his different experience.

For example, let’s imagine that a Spanish boy and a French girl are looking at the same tree at the same moment. Before to see it with a different eye because of their own experience and before that the Spanish boy calls it an « árbol » and the French girl an « arbre », they perceive the same tree, with the same characteristics, and only enjoy the very essence of the tree before to connect it with what they calls « reality ». The truth is that to communicate, we impose to ourselves to conceptualize in a word everything that we live, but as a result, it seems that everyone mistakes this superficial world with the real one, the one in which you are being. Translations destroy a thing as it really is. That is the reason why Hiedegger did not want « Dasein » to be translated. « Being there » can not be translated.

Moreover, Merleau Ponty seems to argue that the history of philosophy hides us the truth. Indeed, just like with the phenomenon of words, you only see the world through concepts that previous philosophers theorized. But you never come back to the basis, the Dasein. You are never being because you live in a society which provides you a certain culture that is the link between you and the world and lock you up instead of making you free. You are being free at the moment when you can perceive the world and free your Dasein.

Recently, you probably heard about the movie « Back to the future » as it took place in October 2015 and that no newspapers have missed to remember this. This is a good occasion to illustrate this idea of a society that dictate your superficial perception of the world. Let’s imagine a minute that you could go back to the sixties and that you would see a flower (yes, I’m in a nature mood). As the sixties are the hippie epoch, the first thing you may do would be to put it in your hair to say no to war. Because making war is bad, and making love is much better. At the contrary, if you see this flower in 2015, the first thing you will do would be to take a picture of it and to post it on instagram with the hashtags #beautiul #nature #flowers #loveflowers #nofilter. And that would be your way to say the to the world that looking at a flower is much more better than fighting with a Kalashnikov. But in both situations, even if you do not think about this flower the same way because this is not the same era, you perceive it the same way. Just because it is you. Just because it is your Dasein. Each time, your Dasein perceive the flower the same way, and you’re being the same. It is only when rationality and culture comes back to your mind that you decide to see it differently.

            In fact, we should try to connect harder and more often with our soul. Socrates said « What do you think, you, without taking care of the common law, of what you’ve been told or of the official speech? Answer with your own soul ». Marc Aurèle meditated every morning and every night to try to be again, without his society’s considerations, to try to return to his Dasein’s thoughts. Consequently, maybe the key of the existence would be a kind of Buddhism? But as Kant said « without sensitivity, nothing would be given to us, and without the thinking, nothing would be thought. Thoughts without intuitions are empty, intuitions without concepts, blinded ». Therefore, being would also be to share things with others, to understand what we live so that we could think about that. And to do that, it is necessary to overweight the Dasein and to make the link with this imaginary reality.

But still, if we consider Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty theories, the one that just want to be aware of all the news, of quick information that medias provides us, that falls onto us everyday, is not the one that is being. Because he can talk about many things but only in a superficial way. It will never be the truth, because it will be distorted by many concepts, many previous theories, many blended perceptions of the world. The one who is being is not the one that can write a text in two parts and two subparts, as we learn to do in Sciences po. Instead of paying attention to divide my text blog in wise sections, if I want to exist now, I should probably try to feel my grey computer under my fingers, not to tell me that this is just a « computer ».

            And this is already the time to conclude and to come back to this mysterious question: Why playing the Sims kills you? Well, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty suggests us to perceive the world as the Dasein perceive it, to be and to ex-ist. The understanding of the existence and science could not help you to reach this goal. Living through concepts and choosing to see the world as it is given to us and not to feel it by ourselves means that we negate our existence and the essence of our existence. In other words, if you live through other feelings than yours, through other lives, other perceptions, like in video games, in particular like in virtual reality games and so like in the Sims, you forget to be. So, burn it.