Existence Pending: The Universe Forgot to Attach the Manual

This piece goes headlong into the lovely messy richness of what life is—all from philosophers, poets, scientists and professional overthinkers. Along with them is a chain of posters marking these diametrically opposite and absurdly tremendous definitions of life, one paradox at time.

Is it Dostoevsky’s hell of self-consciousness, a cosmos where pain is the sole hard currency? Or Socrates' surprise pop quiz with no correct answers—save, of course, for self-knowledge, obtained only through flunking. Is life Aristotle's intellectual jigsaw puzzle, best solved by a good mind and better definitions?

Nietzsche smiles, showing off metaphysical biceps: life is will to power, baby—take the day or go down. Freud protests, puffing on a cigar (which, cynically, is never really a cigar): life is a grand overture to death, libido and Thanatos in a prize fight. Marx rolls into the factory: it’s the notion, comrade—material dialectics and sharing of existential fear.

Picasso grasps a brush. “No, no,” he wails. “Life is art!” And GC Tongbra, with a sideways grin, observes, “It's irony”—an absurd theatre, with you, in arrears, the star, scriptless. Schopenhauer turned his eyes around. “It's suffering. Stop making it pretty.”

Bertrand Russell computes the mathematics of life as competition—civilised if fortune prevails, and savage if the truth tells the tale. Jobs attributes it as belief in the unseen product pipeline. Einstein adjusts his collar, grumbling, “It's knowledge," while Hawking comes back, spinning through spacetime, “It's hope.”

Kafka laughs down an alley—in fact, it's only the beginning. Maybe of something worse. Camus flips a coin. Heads: revolution. Tails: revolution. Either, serve the coffee and accept the absurd. Thoreau lives in a cabin. Rumi runs in circles. Kierkegaard leaps into the unknown. Epicurus reclines under a tree with bread and no X or Instagram.

Laozi watches the river, saying nothing. Jung scribbles dreams. Watts laughs—loudly—“It’s a game!” Victor Frankl tightens his belt: it’s meaning, especially where none exists. Simone de Beauvoir affirms it’s freedom—if you’re ready to wrestle for it. Hegel mumbles something dialectical, and Hobbes interrupts: “No, it’s survival. Hide your bread.”

Rousseau runs into the woods. Marcus Aurelius remains seated, unfazed by all of them. Seneca raises a calm eyebrow and says, “We’re all just preparing for the curtain call.” Confucius arranges the chairs properly.

And yet, for all their wisdom, their strife, their spirals into meaning and metaphysics, there’s a strange silence at the heart of it all. A question no one quite answers:

Why does the universe exist?

For until we're sure of that, how can we define this? Until we know if this universe was started off at random from nowhere by chance, scripted out by all-knowing poet-writers, or created more-or-less at random on the back of some starry post-it notes—then all our definitions of life are poet's versions, good guesses dressed up in philosophy's most stylish finery.

This series of posters is a nod to those guesses: sublime, contradictory, deep, and deeply human. It’s a nod to the efforts to describe the wordless while surrounded by it—like trying to tell you about the play while performing it, blindfolded, in the words you just created.

Step on in. Ride the contradictions. Be awed by the metaphors. And keep in mind: until the universe sends us a memo, life remains beautiful, maddeningly, beautifully undefined.