EPTThere is the unfairness of life. You have no say in who your parents are, if your parents have a drug problem or is Bill Gates, if your parents are famous or your mom had you at 16 because she was "knocked up" and was scared to get an abortion.
So much based on luck. What you look like (in large part), your personality (in large part), your intelligence (in large part) determined by your parents because a lot is hereditary. You don't have a say if you are white, black, skinny, fat, etc. Luck plays a role in the opportunities you get. A starving kid in Africa might actually be more "intelligent" than you (if we consider that intelligence is a least partly innate) but he has no opportunities to learn English or do anything academically, and you might be relatively less intelligent but have all the doors open for you.
Then you just think, well what's the point? And I know this is a philosophical question that's been discussed ad nauseum. But really, is it to have money? To be successful, whatever that means? The extent of human knowledge and limits of our techonology and morality is being stretched more and more every day, but in a sense nothing has essentially changed.
I hardly knew any of my grandparents. One of my grandfathers died before I was born, in fact when my dad was still in college, and the other one died when I was 3. One of my grandmothers died when I was 10, the other one died when I was 18, but she barely left her house. My father keeps telling me stories of how his dad was a great swimmer and interested in politics and was really sad when JFK died.
There is a Muslim girl out there stuck by religion, forced to hide herself from the outside world, because she is a Muslim and because she is a woman. She could have been the next Einstein, the next Steve Jobs, but she never got that chance. It makes me think what I am doing with my life, I have such a great promise, I could do so much, but I limit myself, and not only me. I see many people, who are only just content with what they have, it's both a gift and blessing. When you have people who are happy with what they already have, you have already killed innovation. The question becomes, what is my potential compared to the level I'm at right now.
But then I think, well what's the point of having money? Nice house, nice car, food, family, respect, entertainment, etc? But would I do something I love for less money compared to something I hate for more money? You see, I don't want too much out of life, just enough money to be comfortable and play video games.
Money is just a by-product of success. Sure, you can make money by being a stock broker or a corrupt investor on Wall Street, but how exactly are you helping anyone? How are you changing the world? Isn't personal value and self-worth more important to people than financial well being? No one wants to feel like they're expendable. But that's what happens a lot. I work hard for a computer science degree, then my job gets outsourced to people who will do the same work for a lot less money. But I don't want the money I want that personal satisaction, that feeling that what I'm doing matters. JFK once said that happiness isn't having a yacht or a mansion, it's about fulfilling what you believe to be your potential.
I often think about suicide. Not actually doing it, but the concept of it, the mere idea. You take your own life, but why. The biggest thing you can take from someone is their life, their chance to see where their life would go or what would happen to the world in the future? What about someone's dignity? Torture is immeasurably worse than suicide, but we see suicide as a personal failing because someone is ending his or her own life, whereas torture is forced on someone.
So then it is a gift just to be alive? Let's think about this. You've had parents and grandparents and generations before you, and what's to say that they haven't had the same thoughts, feelings, experiences, inner conflictions as you? You like to believe you're unique but your own grandfather might have been in a similar situation as you find yourself. I see old people all the time, some are poor some are rich, some have been cashiers some have been CEOs, but all of them say the same thing: at the end of the day it's not about how much money you make or how successful you are but the memories you take with you to your deathbed.
Anything you can do, there's probably someone out there who can do it better. But there's also people who suck a lot more than you do. You won't be the richest or the poorest person in the world. You will be in between, in pretty much everything you do. So how does someone escape the existential grip of meddling in mediocrity?
Some say you shouldn't worry about being the best or trying to change the world or make a lot of money. You should do what you love, what brings you the most happiness, what makes you enthusiastic about life. But happiness is so subjective, ethereal, and fleeting. Something you expect to make you happy might actually not. Happiness and joy can come from unlikely places.
Alienation and wide faraway places. The high connectivity and social networking and advancement of technology keeps us all linked constantly, but the substantiveness of relationships aren't any better. Technology makes it so we are led to believe that quantity trumps quality. There are three steps to innovation: coming up with something ingenious or new and standardizing it, then mass producing it. At some point someone develops something innovative and the process repeats itself. So in essence it seems that sometimes humanity is going in circles rather than forward. Technology advances, but people necessarily don't, so machines are inherently going forward while humans struggle with keeping up and this leads to mass depression and sleeping problems in the general population.
What machines do is storing information and using algorithms attempt to use that information and data in a way that a human would, basically using superhuman knowledge to implement in emulating human thinking pathways. But that's not how people learn. People learn by focusing on big ideas or kernels of truth, machines are fed data that they are programmed to categorize into concrete groups. Algorithms tell them how to connect different information, humans do that instinctively.
It's like parents stopping kids from drinking, when they don't realize that if kids don't drink until they get to college, they'll not know their limits and drink too much and find themselves passed out in their roomates bathtub. Don't make a mountain out of a molehill. They say that you know who you are better than anyone, but what if you're wrong? No one wants to be wrong, but everyone wants to be free. You think you know your limits and your character, but how much do you really know?
Would you rather love and be heartbroken or not love and never risk being hurt? It's a risk, but life is a risk by definition. Life is a calculated risk, tomorrow I might walk down the street and get hit by a car, I could have prevented that by looking both ways a little more carefully, but the guy in the car might be super drunk and I might have been negligent enough for a split second, and that could cost me my life. I don't believe in destiny, but some things are just meant to be, and others just aren't. There is a fine line between victory and defeat.
It's all so very subjective. You can say your life is precious, or your girlfriend's life is worth more than millions of dollars, that no one's dignity or respect can be bought for money, but that piece of paper that carries so much social significance is powerful as a motivator. Mao Zedong once said, "I can kill 100 million of my own people without batting an eyelid". If that is the case then what is the value of your own life? Aren't you being selfish when you say that all that matters to you is your own happiness, and that because everyone out there is looking out for themselves that makes it okay to selfishly put yourself ahead of others?
I used to think that the way to achieving sustainable peace is compromise, no not compromise for the sake of avoiding arguments, but compromise in the sense that you've walked in someone else's shoes and you can feel and know what they're going through. True progress stems from empathy and genuine understanding of others. You don't achieve success by focusing on something and only on that one thing to the point of excluding everything else, true knowledge is the result of a comprehensive perspective of the world. You don't do something just because someone told you to, you do it because you've tried almost everything and this feels the closest to your conception of yourself, this is where you're most comfortable. That doesn't mean you pretend like nothing ever exists outside of your own thoughts, it means you realize it and appreciate it, but it isn't your cup of tea.
I don't know, I'm just confused and slightly hurt. At some point you stop feeling pain because you've been overloaded by this sensation, or water tastes bitter after eating candy. At some point you can't cry anymore even if you're hurting on the inside because all the tears dried up from crying yourself to bed every night. When you're not at peace with yourself, isn't that a conflicted and miserable way to live? Sure, it's not something that is outright and directly potent and damaging, but it's like a little rock inside your shoe, it's always on your mind and it's irritating, it doesn't hurt a whole lot but it's always there and you can always feel it. That's what this is like. The world will go on without me, I'm not as important as I think myself to be, I'm not as special as I believe, if I stop existing at this very moment someone might read tomorrow on Yahoo or something that this guy took his own life, and they could be sad for a few seconds and then keep moving on with their life, running down the path of life that tries to barrage you with information constantly without ever considering what the point of anything really is.
I call that never asking the right question and running away from the answers.
