I was booking a reservation at a small mom-and-pop type hotel and the booker said something like, “If you like our place after your stay, you can like it on Facebook!”

And I said, “I don’t have a Facebook account. Not my kind of thing.”

From the reaction I got, you’d think I’d said, “I just killed and ate a few children and boy, was it fun! I hope to do it again real soon.”

In my lifetime I remember how anything anyone did online was considered weird and undesirable, to now where not giving your entire life away to a sociopath is considered socially unacceptable. When I first started using BBSes in the mid-80s, it was a niche activity that only complete and utter loser nerds did.

Now Facebook – which is essentially a shitty, privacy-free BBS – is nearly de rigeur for integration into polite society.

Well, you know what? I’m only faking being part of polite society, so fuck all that.

The reason why professional philosophers deride the problem, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” as a pseudo-problem isn’t because it is actually a pseudo-problem or irrelevant, rather it is scorned as a valid line of inquiry precisely because it is completely flummoxing and essentially destroys – as quantum mechanics does now to science in many ways – their entire enterprise.

Note that I am not saying that philosophy is worthless or that this fact renders it futile. Quite the opposite.

But I am saying that foundational questions that introduce (metaphorical) infinities into any field in general are often dismissed or derided. It is the nature of humanity to do such things.

As William James said, “Philosophy stares, but brings no reasoned solution, for from nothing to being there is no logical bridge.”

Philosophy might never be able to answer this question. Science almost certainly won’t be able to, either. Deciding something is outside of one’s domain and then denigrating those as childish who undertake to at least wish for an answer is far easier than saying, “Yes, philosophy in this respect is likely forever to be broken, but that’s ok as it is at least useful for many other things.”