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?

Why do we think we wasted our teenage years doing something that was useles?

Many times it happens that someone asks us what you did in your high school or early college and your mind suddenly goes into the consciously hidden memories deep in your hippocampus and brings out an image, the spark of which itself creates a feeling of not just emotional but physical pain and embarrassment. “Oh I did something completely useless” we yell. When the pain from this sudden burst of electrical shock starts to subside, we try and repackage the memory and hide it again until someone else entices it out again.

I am sure we all have at some point in our lives have used these same words. Should we really be carrying this burden of emotional memory with us always? Is it really our fault that we chose to do something that we now think was not worth it? Did we really waste that time doing what we did? Well the good thing is that it’s not completely true. Let’s start with the brain of young teenager vs the brain of an adult. It is certain now that some parts of a teenage brain are underdeveloped compared to that of an adult (except if you are Ra*ul G*ndhi, in that case its always underdeveloped). Specifically the prefrontal cortex- which is the execution decision making part. The part that is most involved with rational thinking and logical decision making. This part of the brain lights up when one is given a task related to rational thinking or during logic games. Anyhow, for teenagers this part is highly underdeveloped or is still being developed. Until an individual has reached 25 years of age, this part is always under constant development. It is likely that before this age, we are not really capable of rational decision making (I wonder why we are still allowed to vote under this age. Or to marry. Etc.). Hence any major life decision that you made before that age is likely to look like idiotic or stupid now in hindsight. So if you decided to study philosophy or social studies when you were 20, when you think you should have studies music or arts, don’t worry! The decision was not purely rational and you are not to blame yourself for it. It is just that you were highly incapable of making that decision at that moment of your life. Probably you took that decision because you were a rebel and believed in doing something ‘different’, or you believed in conspiracy theories about science and technology or mathematics being the source of all evil, it is also possible that you studied it because you saw a hot girl/boy in that class who you really liked and took the course just to be in their company (like the genius Richard Feynman did). Oh and maybe because you thought it is the easiest and everything else was close to sorcery. It is also possible you took it because all your ‘friends’ were doing the same. This is called collective delusion (some people even get married like that. Oh humanity!). Whatever your reason was, we all have been there and done that. We all have taken naive decisions that we now regret. But like I said before, our brains were wired differently back then. The question here to ask is that knowing everything about these differences in the psychology of young minds why is our education system build up in the way it is? Why is it so rigid? Is a teenager really capable of making such a major decision about the topic of study for whole of his/her life? Why do we put doors in front of teenagers and ask them to choose one while knowing that probably that there is no coming back from it. Do we really want kids to live with a decision they took when probably they were not even aware why they are taking it? 

So here are my two cents on the topic: chill! The time you probably think you wasted on something is the time you spent learning about yourself, what you like, what you don’t like, where you don’t see yourself, what sort of a person inspires you etc. You spent this time probably meeting new people and making lifelong friends. You could also have spent this time learning about the world and how you were wrong about certain things and change your opinion about them. No one is judging you here so stop doing that to yourself also! Would you rather be in jail? Or working for Donald Trump’s presidency campaign? (I don’t know which is worse). Of course you will feel there were so many things you could have done. But remember, the fact that you are saying this is because you are not the same anymore. You probably have changed; have become more responsible and matured. Hopefully your decisions are more rational now. So go on live your life the way you always wanted. Or at least work towards it. Now you have got no excuses or reasons (biological at least) for making the same irrational mistakes. And if someone asks you the same question in future, remember this fact and answer with confidence and not embarrassment! like a prudent man once said, whenever in doubt trust biology!