There is no optimistic answer to the cruelty of this life!

Originally written on November 16, 2016

"You know? There is no optimistic answer to the cruelty of this life, no matter how philosophers, clergy and psychologists speak. She explains to people why life is worth living and is something positive and meaningful.

Now, you cannot really do this without deceiving them, you cannot be straightforward because the truth is that life is meaningless. You live in a meaningless, random universe, everything you achieve is doomed, the earth will disappear, the sun will explode and the universe will end, and all of Shakespeare and Beethoven’s works will one day disappear no matter how much we appreciate, so it is hard to convince people of something positive about this.

So my conclusion is that the only reliable thing is a distraction. If people get distracted, when they watch a baseball game or watch a movie by Fred Astaire, you do something that distracts them. Now, what gets distracted is that I'm thinking "Oh my God, can I have Emma and Parker do this scene?" As if this matter means something!

It is really trivial and I will solve it if I cannot, my film will be bad, but I will not die about it. So this is what I do, distract myself, and filmmaking is a great distraction. These actresses come to the place of filming, they think about their roles and how they will perform them, and if they do not, they will stay in their homes, or sit on the beach and think: Oh my God, what is the meaning of this life? I will grow old, I will die, those I love will die, will I get bald? What do you see will happen to me?

So all you have to do in life is to get distracted by yourself, to live moments far from facing reality. All great thinkers like Freud, Nietzsche and Eugene O'Neill agree that much of reality is unbearable and it is a bleak thing to think about how to escape from reality. So I go to the cinema. I watch a movie by Fred Esther dancing for an hour and a half, so I stop thinking about death with my debilitated body and that I will be old one day, in the distant future."

Gallery Mustafa Ali - Damascus, Syria