It’s beneficial to step back and observe the human race from a distance, forgetting about your own goals and concerns for a while. In the true Schopenhauerian ‘will-less contemplation’ sense.
The distance has to be perfect. In true Nietzschean sense:
Do not stay in the field!
Nor climb out of sight.
The best view of the world
Is from the medium height.
The view from this distance is worth every sight of it. I mean, just look at us:
The leader of animals, dwelling in this blue marble sort of thing which itself hangs in empty space in a monotonous cycle. Yet, we aren’t inspired by our mother: we don’t want to do the same thing over and over again. We want ‘progress’, we want to grow into something else.
‘Everything has to evolve,’ we say, ‘the earth that you see today wasn’t the same a million years ago!’
We are unique in this sense. We come up with these half-baked theories and understandings of the world and justify our actions. In fact, we come up with particularly those theories that justify our actions. It’s like we as beings only see what we want to see. Our desires are primary. Knowledge comes later. For instance, we don’t say, ‘look how disciplined earth is towards her father…’. We don’t say it because we do not like discipline. We do not want to settle. We want to eat and grow. Eat and grow even if our diet turns us into matricides. But we will come up with some theory to justify that too!
Who are we, by the way?
Some say they have evidence that some god created us, some prove that we are a result of a natural process. But I think both those views are misleading. Distractions. To hide a simple truth: we are nothing!
Yes, we are monsters who like to consume and grow but apart from that, we are absolutely nothing! Kill us now and I don’t think that ‘god’ will even notice. Yes…yes the universe is conscious through us…But what I also get is that it is yet another justification for our existence and appetite.
So the answer to the question above is this: we are nothing apart from greedy monsters. We should have long ago said to ourselves that we are greed manifested in physical form. But there’s nothing wrong with that. Greed is a virtue. It is a virtue because it ensures survival. How else does a creature like this, which believes it has conscience and knows of what it has done in the past, continue on?
Another verification of our nature is through what we worship. Among us, we revere the ones who are the most greedy. While we do this, we are doing nothing else than appreciating our essence. There’s nothing wrong with it. Once again, how else do we go on?
Enough about greed. It’s our driving force. It’s our essence.
Yes, we love science not because we love to learn, we love it because it equips us with powerful guns — and a shot at a good career, of course!
Then there’s entertainment. Our fuel. We of today need it more than the real one. Once we thought the grass was green on the other side and that was our meaning, but then globalization happened. We saw the reality.
If we had meaning other than greed, we would probably be celebrating love and all other feelings. But we have no time nor energy for those things because they consume more. They trigger our imagination. They do things to us. They make us think more. What we need is the emptying of the thoughts. How else do we reset from the exhaustion of constant want? — No, not with a Dostoevskian novel in hand. That’s why, the bulk of us today watch people review movies instead of we ourselves watching one. The former is engaging, the latter stimulating.
‘I watched it, so you don’t have to.’ = ‘I live life, therefore I don’t want you to.’
Humans = Greed + Entertainment. Where everything done for both is pragmatic while if you seek to feel the truth with your flute, you waste your time.
‘What’s your real job?’
Where are we now?
Our biggest achievement is that we have managed to build computers. If we ever needed anything to prove to ourselves that we are superior than the rest, computers have done that for us. They have shown to us that we are capable of creating an entirely new being from scratch. They are our ego inflations. No wonder the most greedy do business on it! And we talk about artificial intelligence now as if we are scared, but what we are actually doing beneath is gloating at our accomplishment. We won’t allow any other being to rule over us! The so-called best among us don’t even allow a normal human being to enter into their territory without years of worship and application.
We have created vessels to take us to the stars. We look at the sight of rocket launches and floating stations with a deep glad sigh. ‘We have achieved so much,’ we pat ourselves in the back. It’s another one of those things that has validated our superiority. One has seen fishes swim and birds fly in the air, who has seen a creature reach the outer space! We try to convince ourselves that going to a different planet will somehow solve our problems where in fact all we are doing with those dreams is trying to fill the void: we are nothing! With a fantasy:
‘May be we will encounter god — who has been sleeping — along the way and wake Him up. Or we will encounter other clever beings like us and life will be meaningful again.’
Meaningful as in new wars, new politics, new golds…
So what else do we aspire to?
Happiness.
What is happiness, anyway?
A neurological condition arising out of the perception that an individual has attained what it set out to attend. It could have meant a lot once upon a time, but not anymore.
What has the individual of today set out to attend?
A piece of cake in this celebration of human coronation. A few more views, a few more likes, a few more subsribers, a few houses, a few more sex, a few cars, a few more countries. A few more hours of forgeting of the existential dread.
What is the lesson humans teach each other?
Don’t kill yourself. You too can eat and grow. That’s the meaning you’ve been after.
