The big questions in life

Imagine that you open your eyes to consciousness one morning. It is cold yet mellow, bright but only slightly, you can almost smell the moisture of the clouds spreading underneath towards the lower ground. You instantly know it is going to rain. The neighbor’s window is still carrying the same cover it always did, the church bell still rings at the hour, you still hear the clocking noise of someone walking in the street in front, You still hear the cars buzzing past. Your brain has somehow learnt to filter these noises without you even realizing that they were even there. You open your eyes and you suddenly realize that your body takes much more effort to be pulled out of bed then it did a couple of decades ago. The head feels much heavier and the thoughts clouded without any certain clarity. Yes you are almost 60. 

Most of the people live the best years of their life viz. 20- 50 by working and paying bills while inundated with thoughts about good financial practices, with bits of real happiness and joy that can only be remembered as disjointed snapshots aka visionary hallucinations of previous vacations or some emotionally long lasting close family events. The brain is very good at creating proxies for memory, which mostly works by the method of association. Think of it like a tag, for every item in your warehouse (emotional event) there will a tag. For eg: vacation, childhood, family etc. Whenever the impulse from one of the input sources (senses) comes in, this part of the warehouse light up (activation in the brain regions).This is exactly what happens in the brain when you remember a vivid moment, for example the first taste of a sweet fruit or the day you first immersed yourself underwater. The brain does not remember the whole event vividly and cannot play the exact event as it happened, because if it were to do so, one would lose track of what is real, the memory recollection or the current conscious state and almost feel like having a hallucination which we all know is the trademark of some mental disorders (except for some hosts in Westworld). The brain rather keeps a proxy for the event which is mostly the beginning, the middle, or the end whichever one is the most “emotional”.

Coming back to the original point, most of us are told when we are children: study hard, get good grades, respect elders, follow traditions, find a good job and “settle”. But what no one ever tells you is what after all that? What is the point of doing this? What comes after that? What is the reason to do that? Why should you care about that? Did someone even ask: what do YOU want to do? What are you interested in? what things to do you care about? I can already imagine that many of you who read the questions above, start to (probably unconsciously) just skip over them like a wave and not ride it in. However, If not then you are in the same boat as me.

I recently learnt that the one of the most important upgrade to humans (evolutionarily speaking) was the ability of abstraction. This lead us to imagine plan future, have questions about ourselves (indulgence with the self), create the idea of a greater being (God) and base theologies or create ideas that do not exists in the real world (intangible). This could even be the reason that we outlived Neanderthals. This ability was important because it made humans who believed in similar ideas, coagulate and hence collaborate to create/understand new stuff. This is why we today have things like agriculture, energy sources, art, medicine and architectural landmarks. It is the basic foundation of our human society. It is this ability of abstraction which is in no other higher primate that helped us become the dominant species we are today. So why does our fellow humans which themselves also possess the same ability tell us or rather “advices” us to not do the same?

My argument being that one can surely live with the “advice” given, but at some juncture in one’s life there will come a point when one will be forced to ask the BIG questions in and henceforth the meaning of life. It will be completely unavoidable and one would be stuck in a state of mind where suddenly everything in their life would seem to be not what they would have wished for! This feeling sometimes in also called mid-life crises, but could happen at any other stage of life. So my question here is, when it is indeed eventual that one will arrive to it at some point in one’s life, why not ask such questions sooner rather than later? There are many benefits of doing so: 1. When one is comparatively younger (around the age of <25) and carries fewer responsibilities, one is still in a tinkering phase, meaning that there would e enough time and little effort to switch the idea of life and idea about what they actually want. One can play around with such ideas without major negative consequences. 2. Since we cannot roll back time, one would avoid being in a situation much later in life (around age 40) of realizing that he/she is living the life that people thought he/she should live and not what the inner voice inside him/her longed for.

So if it were up to me, I would encourage kids as young as 16 to ask themselves these BIG questions in life (ref para 3) and use them a guide to create a life following such questions. It should be noted that the answers to these questions are not always straightforward to find and are mostly not even available at that time. But this would be a start and start somewhere one must! It is the first spark to the fire that will slowly provide ever increasing fuel to the electricity of life.

Some ideas that I can give towards trying to answer such questions is to talk about them with your like-minded friends, Seek meditation from a teacher, try to go within oneself rather than looking to someone else to provide answers to these questions. Read (a lot) get to know about not just yourself but the world around you, and ask yourself what is the thing that keeps you up at night? can you see yourself being a part of that world? Do not care about what others will think of you. It is your body, mind and soul. You and only you are the one master of it.  

Now my final question to you is: why do you wake up every morning? What is your purpose? After all if we are not asking these questions, do we consider ourselves to be truly human?

Digital moralism

Every time i open a link for a news page, i am bombarded with news about the world that is either negative in its nature or is something deeply saddening. Before i know it, the animalistic guilt in me wants to click on it and read it otherwise in my own eyes i will be certified cold hearted, uncaring human with no respect or emotions for humanity and what is upon them. Therefore, my mind implores me to open the link not just to read it but to tell me to be sad over it (Even if my rational mind wants to be a little skeptical about the authenticity of the news), to forcefully react to it in my head and deem it as unacceptable and something that is deeply wrong. It’s as if a big eye is watching over me in my own head judging me for every reaction i make and how i behave. But we forget that eye is nothing but a reflection of our moral mind created by us and extremely influenced by the society around. We all are walking around with that eye above our shoulders. The one who is constantly watching us and through a feedback loop getting stronger, weaker depending on our reactions. Let me give you an example: you are scrolling through your news feed and you see picture of a puppy lying on the road after being hit by a car. Our natural reaction (or the moral reaction) SHOULD be to be sad over it! The image should elicit a feeling of disgust, along with empathy and a desire to help. However, all you can do is to look at the image and share it, get likes on it (or sad emoticons; the new invention by Facebook). But the reality might be that the page that showed it was probably getting paid by the advertising vultures which are praying on emotions of the so called traffic (groups of humans) on its page and using it to stockpile profits. Now if someone asks you who is worse: The person monetizing the picture or the person who just scrolls through without giving an emoticon to it? Who would you judge more? Of course the person who would scroll without giving an emoticon. Because that’s how our mind works, the fast system (irrational one) makes an instant judgement and marks that person as immoral. And the eye sitting on our own shoulders gives a pat on the back and says: see, he is immoral but you are not. So keep going nice human and react to the next image, post, story, etc (like a master training/petting the pet). You will get more morality points from me and you can keep increasing your chest by few cm each time you’re given a pat on the back by THE EYE. 

The truth is that people who really care about these issues are not sitting on their laptops scrolling through the daily binge news and reacting like a monkey on everything they see. Those people are out there and getting their hands dirty fighting for the causes on the ground level. Because that’s where the change happens! Sure you could tell yourself that by sharing a post you are making people more aware of it, but the reality it just like you are sitting behind a screen and sharing it and hoping that someone somewhere will take the responsibility of actually doing something about it, the people who see your post are imagining in the same. Hence welcome to the collective delusion!

So then why do we think that just by reacting it and satisfying our morality egos we will be okay to go on in our lives and every time we look in the mirror we will see an angel with wings helping the world (albeit by sharing posts). Have we become so shallow? That we ourselves decide if we are moral or not and gloat over it? 

If someone really wants to make a difference they will do it without having Facebook remind them of the causes that they SHOULD care about! Facebook cannot decide if you should care about a cause of not. Nor can anyone else. We all are born in different circumstances and depending on your environments, upbringing and other unknown factors, we care about different things.

I am not aware of any cause that was helped be solved by Facebook posts (except ministers saving stranded countrymen in a foreign land for their personal political glory, or the self-mutilating public showering challenges (for ALS). Where also we self-glorified ourselves by Proving to THE EYE and EYES of our ‘friends’ that we care!)

Some people are calling Facebook or virtual reality the new empathy machines. I would call it the virtual empathy machine. It’s just entertainment (even if it entertainment for our negative emotions). Just like the mice in cages which will die of giving themselves shocks rather than sit alone doing nothing, we all are machines programmed to avoid boredom. THIS ladies and gentlemen of the jury is the whole foundation principle of the entertainment industry. So as far as it stays entertainment it’s okay! The moment it tries to leap over and tries to be a digital messiah, it’s a problem. Because it’s trying to do what it was not supposed to, with keeping a curtain on the eyes of the people. Or by attracting their attention on something that THEY want you to see rather than what might be of more importance but something they cannot benefit from (just like in a magic show the magician uses a Beautiful distraction, who is a key part of the delusion). For this one reason, the digital world deeply vexes me, but then again until I am actively releasing rats in the server rooms of the digital shark conglomerates, I am not actually doing anything. But who knows, maybe one day....

Why so serious Jack? This post is supposed to be taken in humor and nothing else.