restaurant menu's.

Ever since i discovered that unless i believe in some divine entity, I don’t have free will, I’ve stopped reading menus of restaurants.

I go by some arbitrary metric that is not related to the food.

Sometimes my friends are caught by surprise.

We enter the food establishment that one of us chose based on a google maps rating algorithm that we trust blindly. Before any of us have seen what they have to offer, i exclaim

“RAPHAËL! I will have whatever you’re having.”.

His response may be something like

“I don’t even know what I am getting”

With an existentialist smirk i respond:

“Exactly my point Raph!”

Other times i will simply pick the pizza with the funniest name.

Or perhaps i just pick the first thing that i see when i open the menu, as if it were one of those old facebook posts with the caption

"What words did you find ?!?!?".

The first words i would find would always be something terrible like

Comfort

Confidence

Beauty

Those are the most capitalistic desires one can have xd.

Comfort is relative and beauty is subjective. Confidence is arguably not even a positive trait unless it comes paired with some sort of happiness.

Dostoyevsky wrote in “notes from the underground” about freedom, reason and desire.

The storytelling character writes about how one could react if science were to reach a point where it can fully predict everything we are going to do.

The character argues that our right to desire things that are unreasonable and foolish for ourselves, is the very essence of our personality and individuality.

As Dostoyevsky put it - If it were so that people are pianokeys being played by the laws of nature, would we not want to stand our ground and do the opposite on purpose?

What should we then do? What are the implications?

For me, this means i will not read any of the ingredients of what I’m ordering.

This also means that sometimes i will call my friends and ask what i should make for dinner.

I am preserving my unreasonableness.

I refuse to become a bourgeoisie “homo economicus” who only acts upon reason and best practise. I don’t want to do something, merely because i should.

I want to do things inefficiently, i want to actively “choose” un-enjoyable things.

For I am not a piano-key.

I don’t want to partake in becoming the “invisible hand of the free marketplace”.

I want to make stupid investments and spend my money unreasonably.

Perhaps i will donate too much money and spend the rest on something that kills me like cigarettes.

Then again, cigarettes are a multi million (probably billion) dollar industry, and by becoming addicted to them i am playing right into the capitalist hand! What can i do? Distressing indeed!

May this wicked world be cursed with illness and torment!

I am NOT a reasonable man!

And this, quite ironically seems like the most reasonable approach to me.

For me, being stupid and unreasonable seems completely reasonable.

I am not even sure if people are able to change their mind on anything.

And in this spesific example, I am “people”.

-Stay stupid. Stay foolish.