2013-06-09

A four-panel comic showing a conversation between two men: a younger clean-shaven man and an older bearded bald man with glasses. The older man delivers an earnest philosophical monologue: he's read a great deal of philosophy about what we are, why we are, and where we're going, and concluded that although it's all pointless, evolution has accidentally given us the ability to perceive our own existence and the awareness that there are things we like. The younger man notes that between those two facts you can form a closed loop of meaningfulness. The older man builds to a grand conclusion: we must embrace humanness, embrace high and low pleasure, love and hate, be afraid, be brave, be little, be big. He then asks the younger man what he's doing today. The young man replies, "Grading essays on Kant?" The old man asks, "Embracing the hate, then?" and the young man deadpans, "Bingo." The joke: the lofty call to embrace all of human experience cashes out, in practice, as just hating a tedious chore. Votey (aftercomic): a crude smiling face drawn with an additional frown-shaped curve on its forehead, captioned "HATRED IS JUST A SMILE ON YOUR FOREHEAD."