Brad Pitt's Pointless Life

I'm perplexed by reading Brad Pitt's admission that his life was pointless while he was married to Jennifer Anniston.  Apparently, Brad has said similar things before and it has led to a firestorm of tabloid controversy, in which he has been pressed mercilessly on The View or Good Morning, America and other intellectual fora as to the deeper import of his complaint: is Brad saying that Jen, or Jenn - Gin, whatever - is boring? This is, of course, what he was saying.  He was bored by Jinn in ways he has never been bored by Angelina Jolie.

When Brad says his life was "pointless" before, but now isn't, I conclude (naturally) that, post hoc ergo propter hoc, he is claiming his life now has meaning.  This isn't altogether fair. See, the way I look at it, all Brad Pitt has to do in the morning, in order to be completely assured of outrageous wealth and stature in our society, is to wake up and resume another day of looking the way he does.  That's it.  American society makes no further demands on Brad Pitt.  We just want him to keep looking like Brad Pitt for as long as he can. 

I think his PR people, in order to earn their salaries, nevertheless take a more activist position. If they told Brad the truth, that all he has to do is walk around in the world looking like Brad Pitt, sign an occasional movie deal, go to an awards ceremony, fly over to Cannes for the festival, etc., even Brad Pitt would figure out that he doesn't really need them.  So I think the PR flacks occasionally put a bug in his ear: it's time to diss Jen again.  Brad has dissed her a lot, which, of course, has been materially to Jen's advantage.  Whenever Brad disses Jen, Jen, holding back tears, appears on the cover of a tabloid in your checkout line, wondering out loud when the pain will ever stop, and if you read the story (which you won't, because a reader of Waldenswimmer is not likely to), you'll see where she is admired for her plucky response to this latest verbal assault from Brad's PR people, which has been carefully calibrated and choreographed, of course, by Jennifer Anniston's PR people working with Brad's PR people.

I don't have any people, which places me at a disadvantage.  Also, my life remains pointless, another way in which Brad Pitt has left me in the dust.  To console myself, I remind myself that in the sense that Fyodor Dostoevsky used "pointlessness" in his masterful Notes From the Underground (the greatest philosophical essay masquerading as a novel ever written, quite a bit deeper than Camus's L'Etranger, which was not too shabby), Brad Pitt's life in fact remains pointless too, Angelina be damned. What he sees as the meaning in his life, now that the life form Brangelina has sprung into existence, is an illusion, pure and simple.  He hasn't found something that I can't find, no matter what he says.  He invests way too much importance into his inane utterances and disses just because he has People and, of course, those looks.  I concede the looks.  There's nothing I can do about those.

The double whammy humans engineered is that not only do they find themselves philosophically adrift in a universe which silently rebukes their pleas for meaning (something which is not our fault, after all), but they have now succeeded in destroying the Earth as a habitat for living out that pointless life.  I have often wondered whether there is not a strong nexus between those two phenomena, those two ideas, those two inevitable conclusions.  In our mindless confusion and rage, we have engaged in a war of wanton spoliation of our natural legacy, as if to say, if our lives must be as pointless as Brad's with Jen, then we shall take it all with us when we go.