One of the hardest things for a human to comprehend is the idea of an end.
The idea of our existence ending and not having the slightest definitive clue as to where
it may or may not go.
How we can fall in love with life and all the things within it.
How we can feel so strongly about our passions and careers.
And how we can analyze, appreciate, and mend the features of our identity, all for it just
to end and dissolve into the ether.
Like all living organisms, as soon as we are born, we begin our journey towards death.
We travel through life with our finite timeline hovering over us, forced to live with the
increasing pressure of only having so much time to decide what to do with time itself.
When we are young, we don’t think or worry about this so much.
Our consciousness is not yet developed enough to consider the concept of life and death.
But as we get older and step more and more into our consciousness, we begin to grasp
the shortness and complexity of life as we realize that our parents and teachers no longer
have all the answers to our increasingly critical questions of life.
And interestingly, simultaneous to our developing realization of this, our life becomes filled
with increasing amounts of work and responsibility.
As a child, we go from hanging around at home, to having to go to school.
And as we progress through school, each grade becomes slightly harder and more time consuming
than the previous.
Then we go from high school to college or a career and then hopefully to success, as
we might define it, each stage requiring more and more of our time and energy.
It appears that as we become closer and more aware of life’s approaching end, life requires
more and more from us.
But why is it that we are willing to invest increasing amounts of time and energy into
a life that we are getting closer and closer to losing?
Why work our life away in pursuit of goals and achievements for them to most likely just
dissolve away with us when we die.
The reason is simple.
We strive for purpose, achievement, and wealth, beyond just our survival needs, because it
distracts us from thinking about this very idea of our mortality in a healthy and sustainable
way.
What’s worse than to live and work towards something that doesn’t ultimately matter
to the universe, is to live a life having done nothing but sit with fear and sadness.
To waste the experience on inactivity.
If we do not work towards goals and dreams, we will have nothing to focus on and all of
our unutilized time and energy will divert towards destructive habits in an attempt to
occupy our mind away from thinking about death and futility.
Purpose and success is arguably nothing more than a human construct designed to distract
us from the fact that we are only conscious enough to create and achieve, but not conscious
enough to understand the point of any of it.
To acquire true purpose and success in life is not necessarily to achieve wealth, fame,
or status, but to feel the passion and vitality that comes from working towards goals and
dreams.
To be happily distracted away from worrying about life’s complexity and shortness.
In life, we play video games, board games, sports games etc. not because they go on forever,
but because they are fun and engage our capacity to feel human.
We play them because they help us forget about the reality of life’s impermanence.
And because we need the feeling of having some participation in the collective happenings
around us in order to feel happy and alive.
And the game of life itself is no different.
By nature, we are all competitive beings.
And to not work, contribute, and feel involved is to feel unimportant and lesser than our
fellow humans.
And there are few things that kill a soul quicker than the feeling of inferiority and
insignificance.
Even more so than the realization of the absurdity of the game itself.
Ultimately we are left with two choices in life.
Play and enjoy the game as best we can, or stay on the sidelines and complain about
the rules.