I’m usually picky with horror movies. I prefer more supernatural than all out gore. I’m fine with a little gore, but gore for gore’s sake just feels cheap to me. I’ve watched two horror movies this Halloween season. I watched 28 Years Later last night. It wasn’t too bad. 7/10. I watched Stephen King’s The Monkey today and liked it a lot better. It hit me harder than I expected.
Beneath all the supernatural horror — the cursed toy, the unshakable deaths — there’s a deeper, quieter terror; nothing anyone does actually matters. No prayer, no effort, no redemption changes the outcome. The monkey bangs on its drum and death follows. That’s it.
But what surprised me was that I didn’t find it bleak. I found it comforting. There’s a strange peace in realizing that life, in all its chaos and noise, doesn’t add up to anything cosmic. We live, we love, we lose, we die. The monkey drums, and the world keeps turning.
If nothing truly matters, then everything is equally free; every small joy, every passing moment, every act of kindness or rebellion exists for its own sake. There’s no final meaning to chase or ultimate purpose to prove. The universe isn’t watching, judging, or keeping score.
And maybe that’s the most honest freedom there is. Once you stop searching for meaning, you can finally live without it.
Sisyphus Shrugged 
There is a comfort in nothing, it removes so much responsibility from us.
I contemplate such things sometimes, when I feel up to it, lol. I come up with a few things. Maybe there’s no purpose or reason, but maybe there’s meaning. Which feels like the best case scenario for my brain. But that does put responsibility back on our shoulders to a little degree.
In the end, perhaps nothing that we believe even matters. It all happens and goes by no matter what. 🤷♀️
LikeLiked by 1 person
Natalie here by the way, sorry if the name changes are confusing lol 😛
LikeLike
I get that. Meaning as something we make rather than something that’s given feels like the middle ground between nihilism and faith. But even then, the meaning we create disappears with us. It’s real while we’re alive, but it fades when we do, like a campfire that burns bright for a while and then turns to ash. Maybe that’s enough. Maybe the temporary is the only kind of meaning that ever really existed.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I suppose I have a different perspective on that. Here’s the way I see it, we disappear but what we’ve left loves on in example and what surrounded us, people, experiences, stories and situations, that we’ve made impressions upon, good or bad, remains.
It might be smaller and nameless, but those remnants never disappear entirely. But then again, I tend to think of being human as a collective thing not an individual thing which definitely colors my perspective
LikeLiked by 1 person
That’s a fair point. We leave traces — stories, habits, memories — little echoes that shape people in ways we’ll never see. Maybe that’s the only kind of immortality that exists. But even that fades eventually. Generations pass, names vanish, even the ripples go still. Still, I like the idea that while it lasts, we’re all carrying pieces of each other forward.
LikeLike