muddle
Explanation
This comic tackles the tension between two philosophical approaches to life: accepting your place in a web of human relations versus pursuing a "transcendent, authentic selfhood."
In the first panel, someone poses this as an either/or question. A character responds: "That's a false dichotomy." When told "You think you can do both?", they reply: "I can do neither."
The character then delivers their actual life philosophy: "I'm just gonna muddle through, baby. I'm gonna be dazed, never reflective. I'm gonna work nights and weekends and run out the clock on this dying corpse." The other character responds with apparent awe: "You're an entirely new way of being." But the final punchline deflates this: "No no, everyone does it. They just don't realize."
The humor works on multiple levels. First, it subverts the lofty philosophical framing by introducing a third option that is neither acceptance nor transcendence but simply stumbling through life without thinking about it. Second, the joke is that this "muddle through" approach, which sounds like a bold philosophical stance when articulated, is actually the default human condition — most people live unreflectively, working and aging without ever consciously choosing a philosophical framework. The comedy comes from the gap between how profound this sounds when stated explicitly and how mundane it is in practice.
The title "Muddle" captures this perfectly — it's not a grand philosophy, just muddling along.