Gist

If thought is food for the brain, I must say, the last few days have been quite sumptuous for my malnutritioned mind. Through intense deliberations and numerous arguments, through myriad paths of reasoning, and diverse ways of logic, I seem to have realized whats only very well known about life already. While Descarte set the stage on fire by his cogitation on the trustworthiness, or rather the lack of it in most matters pertaining to life except one's capacity to doubt, I have formally come to the conclusion, 'Why bother ?'. Put in other words, it simply means what each one of us is subconsciously aware of but are too chicken to admit, i.e. 'It does not matter'. Not only does everything not matter, the worse part is, driven by the higher intellect that we as humans have been gifted with, we just do not want to face this cruel fact.

And how did I realize this ? Simple. I just went through the history of human civilization and did not find even a single human being who was born before 1890 and had not died by now. Countless philanthropists, numerous criminals, innumerable literateurs and poets and leaders, thousands of philosophers and saints, all of them just withered away against the winds of time. Sure we remember a lot of them by what they did but at the risk of hurting our collective ego, might I just add here, 'So ?'. Human life has this cruel habit of wearing rose tints on its glasses. It smears the truth that is painfully out there and gives us a misplaced sense of self-importance, and creates for us a cruel illusion of a higher purpose for which a mortal being should aspire. Our narcissistic indulgence, often bodering on vulgar self-occupation, has created this elaborate stage where we are led to believe that since we have a higher capacity of intelligent cognition as compared to say a monkey, somehow our purpose here on earth should be higher and nobler than the lesser creatures who primarily live to feed and reproduce. We often tend to ignore the argument that had these animals possesed the intelligence to invent slightly better means of intellectual pastimes, they would probably have lived their lives for things more than just food and reproduction. Come to think of it, we all do the same. We have invented pastimes our intelligence allows and are happy to live through our lives on them without even thinking about why we should be living the way we are. Thats exactly what animals do. Nature, as the great leveller she is, makes us all equal in this subtle way wherein each of the species on this planet just keeps doing what it knows best, completely unconcerned about the weightier issues of 'What and Why'. And then she acts like the unreasonable hag that she is and punishes humanity for its intelligence with its painful realization of its emotional suffering.

All this intelligence that we are so smug of, only goes into making our lives more miserable. Of all the human faculties that our intelligence has engendered and that have led to his sorry state, I believe there is none more cruel than hope. It keeps driving us like a horse with a carrot tied in his front and we keep running after that carrot week after week, month after month, year after freaking year. True, the carrot keeps changing but the thing that never changes is its capacity to delude. Somewhere down below it makes us all believe that we are working towards a better life, never actually realizing what that ideal is. And it is only natural. In this constantly flowing world, it is only appropriate that our ideals are also fluid. Hope deludes us in the guise of love, it decieves us in the garb of wealth, misleads us under the viel of fame and tricks us in success. And it does it all so cruelly and laughs all the way at the fool man makes of himself.

So what should man do to circumvent this conundrum? How should life be led? Now that we have concluded that the worth of our lives is no pricier than that of an earthworm and no cheaper than the greatest leaders, how exactly should it be led ? On a scale as cosmic as our universe, it is only a folly as blinding as narcissism that can make us believe otherwise. I think that the least that we can do is to live in a way that makes us happy. Its sounds pretty simple in theory but alas, human mind has developed to such a complexity, it refuses to accept things so simple and untangled. There are so many issues cluttering the space between our ears, it is hard to fathom how such simplicity could be comprehended. Even if we do realize it, our social considerations have placed such tight restraints over our souls, it is often next to impossible to put our noble intentions in practice. Perhaps we can all live a better life if we just realize that its not going to matter in the end. It does sound awfully pessimistic but who said that the rules of life could not and should not have been written in the Shakesperean way of a shattering tragedy. Realization of truth can never be termed pessimistic. It is merely intelligent and like all things intelligent, it has an underlying sadness. Its like a dying flower. Its not the flower that is sad. Its the idea of its dying that is sad and that idea is nothing but a child of our own intelligence.