It can probably be said of all the things that we would consider to be lusts, that is things which people unduly love in raw gratification of the self, basically extend from two main telos; those are the elimination of pain and the maximisation of pleasure. It should surprise no-one that once again we stare hard at the beast which shouts "I" at the heart of the kosmos which wants to make value judgements betweem what is "yummy, yummy, yummy" and what is "not yummy" and then yell longly and loudly when it does not get what it wants. Indeed the fulfillment of what the beast wants to an unlimited capacity, which is the basis of gluttony and greed, is nothing more than the beast going to unreasonable lengths to achieve the fulfilment of those wants
All of that is fine and we can acquiesce to reasonable limits being placed upon us, where the beast is chained and power restrained, but what happens if the things which we want are not unduly selfish and in some cases quite reasonable; yet we still can not have them? What then? People will acquiesce that undue desire in pursuit of raw gratification of the self is bad but by the same token, it is not of itself bad to have needs, desires, preferences, and wants. You are allowed to want things. Some of those things such as a want to be happy, or find fulfillment in work, or to achieve something, or to make the kosmos a better system, or to improve the lives of other people, or to fight for justice, equality, fairness, or even to love and be loved, are arguably the higher and better ends of life and may even hint at what the telos of life actually is.
The kosmos however, is apathetic and agnostic to our existence. Perhaps one of the most brutal realisations that one can come to, and this especially comes into sharp focus when one is attending a gravesite memorial service, is that the kosmos is perfectly capable of carrying on when someone has departed. It seems almost cruel that everyone else in the world, goes on exactly as they had before as though the person of whom your are attending the memorial service, matters not a jot. To them, that person does in fact matter not a jot. Likewise, the people attending the memorial service, matter not a jot to the rest of the kosmos. As limited beings who can only see the world from a single perspective, it sometimes seems utterly horrific that you, matter not a jot to the rest of the kosmos. Likewise, it immediately follows that the kosmos will also carry on completely perfectly after we too have departed this mortal coil and been and gone.
That sense of utter apathy by the kosmos to us, is sometimes an immense source of angst and frustration. Perhaps one of the most obvious consequences of being a very small thing in complex kosmos which is mostly apathetic towards us, is that we have very little control over the kosmos at large. We have some degree of control of the space within the fortress of our minds and if we are granted responsibility and authority over circumstances and other people, we might have control over those too. However, for the vast vast vast bulk of the kosmos, we have very little control of very much. Even the richest trillionaires who control vast amounts of dollarpounds, or general in armies who control large numbers of soldiers and troops, or politicians who can control the shape of the law and the destiny of nations, all still can not control very much. Consequently, the beast which shouts "I" at the heart of the kosmos knowing that it has very little control over very much, is often frustrated at what it can not do.
As far as the environment is concerned, we can not control whether it is hot or cold outside, we can not control whether it is sunny or cloudy, and we can not control whether it is windy or calm. We can control those things to some degree if we are inside but that still leaves things that we can not control. We can not for the most part control the automatic systems within our own bodies either. We can control a lot of gross and fine motor controls and yes, you can control your breathing and maybe the blinking of your eyeballs, but you can not control your digestion, or the internal movements of your bowel, or even the beating of your heart to much of a degree.
Yet here we are, as the central character of our lives; being unable to control particularly a lot about them. We have agency and we can make decision about a lot of things but even then, so much of our lives are a total crapshoot. Some people are just lucky to be dealt with sixes and eights, and some poor people roll box-cars and snake eyes in the great dice roll of life. Depending on what your religious views of the kosmos are, this may or may not be the result of election by a supreme being but even if it is or is not, when life hands you horrid circumstances then people very quickly to cursing the skies, cursing god, cursing the kosmos, and trying to yell into the great apathy. For someone who is the main character in the narrative of their own lives, everything that they can not control, everyone that they can not control, everyone circumstance they can not control, can all become immense sources of frustration.
It does not help that one of the problems that we have with living inside of the prison and fortress our own minds is that we can not see into or know the minds of other people. This means that we can not fully understand the minds of other people or even the actions which they do. This also plays in concert with the fact that as we are living inside of the prison and fortress our own minds with only our own perspective, then we are by default the central and main character of our own lives and our own story. In trying to make sense of the kosmos, we construct narratives and stories which make logical sense to us. The problem in doing that is that as we are small beings with incomplete information, the narratives and stories and actions of other people might not make logical sense to us. There is massive amounts of space between what makes logical sense for us and the narratives and stories and actions of other people; which means that other people can appear stupid, obnoxious, and just plain daft to us. Quite often it is not the materiel of what has happened but the seemingly illogical actions of other people which is the source of our frustrations.
I think it was Jean-Paul Sartre who quipped that "Hell is other people". I do not claim that this is necessarily true but what is true is that other people are obviously playing with as much incomplete information as I am. Even then that's generous because deep down we all know that not only are other people stupid, obnoxious, and just plain daft, but they can on occasion be belligerent, cruel, irrational, cranky, mean, revengeful and above all selfish. The reason why we know this to be true is that we know first hand that we are exactly like them. However, it is one thing to find fault with other people but the beast which shouts "I" at the heart of the kosmos point blank refuses to admit that it is the source of an equal amount of belligerence, cruelty, irrationality and selfishness, even though we know it to be true. What is worse is that when you have eight billions of people who are all selfish, that creates massive feedback loops everywhere. For example, the fact that just five people control more income than half the world's population or that the largest 200 corporations account for more than a quarter of all economic activity, are facts in the abstract which stem from that mass selfishness but when that is narrowed to a very micro view of the world, the effects of that mass selfishness are still noticeable.
Given that the kosmos is apathetic towards us, and that people are irrational, and sometimes mean, revengeful and above all selfish, then what are we to do? Frustration in response to both the kosmos and people not working (including ourselves), would indicate that there is at least some residual hope that the kosmos can be better. If the kosmos can actually not get better, then the two rational responses are despair in the face of it and/or acceptance, because refusal to accept reality seems like a losing game to me. If things can actually get better though, then the first and most obvious reponse to to ask that favourite question of small children - "why?" Sometimes children will ask this because they are genuinely curious about how the kosmos works and sometimes they ask the question out of boredom or because it is fun to get an annoyed rise out of people but that simple question if "why?" as people get older generally gets more desperate as people grow up and realise the sheer horror of being a small thing in a vast kosmos with very little power. Why don't people like me? Why does my boss hate me? Why doesn't that thing work properly? Why is the system broken? Why haven't they done what they said they would? Why is the kosmos so unpleasant? Asking questions about how the kosmos works via the process of science nurtures curiosity but being forces to ask questions about why the kosmos is apatheistic or agnostic or atelostic, is quite another.
Does frustration have any telos or serve any proper purpose? Maybe. Within the 1944 Jean-Paul Sartre play "Huis Clos" (No Exit), three people are trapped in one single dark room. They can not escape the physical space that they are in but worse, they can not the watchful gaze of each other. Is the room actually Hell? We never find out. What we do find out though, is that beyond being trapped by the space and each other's gaze, they are trapped by the judgments of their cellmates. Hence why "Hell is other people". Their response is that after they have got beyond passing judgment each other as objects (for it is objects that I everyone appears to other people), they end up confessing their sins to one another and fall into a bizarre love triangle. Perhaps even scarier of all, they learn to love themselves.
Maybe this is what frustration is actually for. Sure, you can try and hide yourself in a dark, lonely room so that you don't have to put up with other people and so that you don't have to put up with the kosmos at large, but you will never ever be able to run away from yourself. Sometimes things are just horrible. It is a reasonable to be frustrated when machines do not work and/or fail, or when systems do not work and/or fail, or when systems do not work and/or fail. Being frustrated when someone was mean or nasty, when the bus never arrived, when the computer crashed, when someone took the last of the coffee and didn't replace it, when you were standing outside and suddenly it rained down nine kinds of rain, or when your supplier said they'd deliver something on Thursday and they never did, or when your train just stopped and your were an hour late, et cetera et cetera etcera. It is a reasonable response to be frustrated and angry and cranky and sad and disappointed with the kosmos, with other people and with ourselves but that frustration at least indicates that hope still exists.
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