DE Weekly: Ozymandias, Breaking Bad, & Illusion
Below is an archived email originally sent on January 27, 2025.
Ozymandias, Breaking Bad, & Illusion
The great existential question has always been “What is the meaning of life?” The consensus vote of the existentialists was, more or less, “Life has no inherent meaning.” If that’s the case, then it’s up to us to create our own meaning.
That’s all well and good. But we’re still left without a solution. So, we have to ask ourselves, What do I do if life has no meaning? Furthermore, how do I find my purpose?
Something I take solace in is the fact that these questions I ask myself and these philosophical quandaries I back myself into are not original problems.
These are not new. They are human questions; many people before me have asked them and many people after me will ask them, too.
In December, I wrote a newsletter connecting Dylan Thomas’s poetry with the 2014 film Interstellar. I highlighted the fact that our fascination with and our conclusions about the human condition transcend time, that these works are always relevant.
That’s true in many more instances than just that one. Take the 1818 poem “Ozymandias” and the TV show Breaking Bad for example.
“Ozymandias” is a poem (a sonnet, to be exact) written by the English Romantic poet Percy Shelley. Fun fact: he was the husband of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. Power couple right there.
I won’t copy/paste the whole poem, but here’s the link so you can go read it.
In the poem, the narrator recounts an encounter with a traveler who told him a story of a decaying monument he came across in the desert.
The monument was to Ozymandias––the Greek name for Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II, or Ramses The Great. On the pedestal of the monument was this inscription:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
What is this trying to convey? For one, despite being the most powerful man of his time, Ramses and his empire inevitably died and declined, left to decay in the sands and the winds.
All his ambitions and his power turned out to be fleeting––ephemeral.
The TV show Breaking Bad pays homage to this poem in its final season––in its third-to-last episode, actually.
If you haven’t seen the show, I’ll catch you up to speed.
Walter White is a middle class high school chemistry teacher diagnosed with terminal cancer. With limited time left to live, he decides to try and make money to leave behind for his family. He does this by cooking and selling crystal meth––pure as can be, thanks to his knowledge of chemistry.
However, the more power Walt gains, the more his ambitions change. He’s not satisfied with just the money––he wants the power. It feels good. The problem with this is that it doesn't last.
In the episode titled “Ozymandias”, we see everything Walt has built begin to crumble. His brother-in-law Hank, a DEA agent who recently learned who Walt truly was, is on his knees in the desert with a gun to his head.
Walt begs the wielder of the gun, Jack, not to shoot him. One thing Walt always claimed was that he never wanted to involve his family in this life. But Hank knows too much at this point to be left alive.
As Walt is pleading to Jack, Hank says to him, “You're the smartest guy I ever met... but you're too stupid to see... He made up his mind ten minutes ago.”
“Do what you’re gonna do,” Hank says.
Hank was wise enough to know what was coming. Walt, however––in all his hubris and blinding drunkenness of power––thought he could last forever.
Of course, at the end of the series, the destruction is complete and we see all that was lost as Walt’s empire crumbles around him before he himself is destroyed.
Let’s tie this back in with the poem “Ozymandias” now.
That a poem from 1818 could speak so assuredly of a modern ordeal like Walter White’s is proof that we all share some very base things in common as humans. The past can inform the present.
The underlying message I believe the connection between these two works screams is this: human beings have been here before.
Much like we all search for the meaning of life, death will come for us all. Power, fame, money, anything else we might search for, is fleeting.
The German philosopher Karl Jaspers has a good quote for this: “Life is illusion, disillusionment is destruction.”
What Jaspers means by this is that life, in its infinite complexity, can feel like an illusion if we look too much into it. We might start to question the meanings of things, question our belief in reality, and question what’s real and what’s not.
What about the latter half of the quote––Disillusionment is destruction?
I like to view this as a positive statement. I think Jaspers is trying to say that we absolutely cannot let ourselves be stopped in life by what we think may happen after our death.
While we all die, even Ozymandias, even Walter White, that does not mean we should not strive in life to find a purpose (although hopefully we find a better purpose than cooking meth).
The meaning of life is not in its end, but in its journey––not in death, but in life itself.
Does the fact that Ozymandias died and his empire crumbled mean it was all for nothing?
Does the fact the existentialists I write about every week are dead mean their words are dead, too?
Did Camus live a life of purpose? Did Sartre? How about the ones who believed in God? Augustine, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky?
My thought is yes, of course they did. From Ozymandias to me to you, we cannot live in fear of our own end. We cannot live in fear of being forgotten or of our legacies crumbling in the wind and the sand. We must live in the here and now and live every day with a purpose in search of meaning.
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Brandon J. Seltenrich
P.S.––
To promote the final season of Breaking Bad, they had Bryan Cranston (Walter White) read the entirety of “Ozymandias” for the season trailer. Follow this link to watch it––it’s very good.
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