A sequel to Perception of life in the T.I.M.E., here the article is much more pratical and applied to real life.
Are you already preparing to digest the last paragraph by swallowing gallons of Alcohol to forget? Don’t. We are the ones who decide what to do and what paths to take, and happiness in doing something we enjoy depends mainly on us.
Aside from the rare cases where you are in debt up to our necks or you are in a really bad situation that is beyond your control (physical or psychological), most of life’s problems come from the little everyday things. We are the architects of ourselves; if we feel fulfilled in our lives, we can appreciate what we have instead of continuing to suffer in unhappiness.
Considering our period of time to spend on earth as insignificant compared to the entire history of the universe, the significance we assign to it depends entirely on ourselves.
If we ask different people about the meaning of life, we will get very different answers:
"I live to reincarnate into a better person and relive a new life""I live to eat pizza and pay €50 a day for a beach umbrella at beach establishments""I live to play and have fun""I live to enjoy retirement and rest after a lifetime of work"Floop Floopian: “I seek a great warrior to kill me so that I can live in peace in heaven”
Morty: “Do you have evidence that heaven exists?”
the alien escapes, a car hits him, and as his soul is swallowed by darkness, he continues to curse Morty
Ooops, the last one comes from Rick & Morty Season 3.
If at a certain time you haven’t assigned yourself a purpose in life, whether small or big, you will most likely feel lost and you won’t be happy with the moments you live, because you don’t know where ou are going, there isn’t a destination.
As far as we know, life is unpredictable, and because of this unpredictability, both positive and negative things happen to us from time to time. However, can we, by our decisions, influence the percentage of positive events so that they outweigh the negative ones?
The perfect word to describe this is boh, which in Italian means I don't know.
Certainly, however, we can try to change our situation, and if we surrend to the plan that fate has in store for us, we likely remain stuck in our starting position (social position, economic position, knowledge about something, etc. ) and the chances of improving it diminish dramatically.
Here I’m assuming that you could believe in the nonexistence of fate, but there is also the possibility that fate showed you this article to let you understand that you need to do something about your life, and the fact that you are reading this article is written in your destiny.
In the past 80 years there has been basically no war in the West.
It took “only” 2 huge wars in 30 years, and millions of deaths, to achieve this much desired peace.
We are in one of the most peaceful periods in recent history (at least in the last 2000 years), and just being born in a rich country, with a good life expectancy and in a relatively peaceful period can tell us that we live pretty high in the standard of living of human beings.
As George Orwell wrote in 1984, by having Goldstein tell it in his book, in that dystopian world, endless war served to destroy the wealth created by people’s productivity, because if wealth improved people’s lives, it would be much harder for the government to control them.
Applying his reasoning to reality, in this last period of peace we have produced 10 times more wealth than all previous years combined.
Famous is the quote that, with the progress of science, the average person in the West today lives even better than a king a few centuries ago.
So, you have decided that your next goal to achieve in life is to become a very rich person.
Very well, you are free to try it in our capitalist world, if you succeed (and this is not sure), you don’t have to work in your life unwillingly anymore (and that is not always the case, maybe you love the work you are doing, I do). You probably won’t stop working altogether right away but will devote yourself to what you enjoy, you will be more willing to take risks in your choices because it doesn’t depend solely on your current job position.
However, what if I told you that obsession with getting rich is not everything? You certainly won’t become important in the long run if you only get a little money.
The richest people of the past have been forgotten today and their descendants have spent all the wealth, there is no family that has held wealth for a thousand years or more, or even if there were, it would not be a significant percentage compared to all the others who didn’t make it.
A person like Jeff Bezos (Amazon founder) will end up in history books in the next few years, but in 2,000 years who knows if he will still be known.
Today in school we learn the names of all the greatest emperors of the past, but we have no idea who the richest people of the time were, maybe a few archaeologists know but not common people.
Assuming that you can keep some wealth for thousands of years, in what form would you keep it? A bad investment would still have you holding nothing.
If you keep physical banknotes, since they no longer have any real underlying value and more and more is issued over time (in Roman times, currency was physically gold so value existed in its own).
If you were a Roman, you would then have thought that salt, natrium, was a good investment, so much so that workers received it as wages (salt -> salary), today you can find it at very low prices in all supermarkets.
Then in more recent times there was the diamond scandal. The world is full of diamonds, really full, and a shortage was artificially created in order to raise the price of diamonds by a lot (perception was everything), manipulating the market while meanwhile the biggest companies had warehouses full of them.
Although the idea of being richer than average may seem appealing to you, would you want to be equally so if you lived in a poor country? By rich here I don’t mean multimillionaire, just richer than average, wealthy in that particular country.
In poorer countries usually the average level of wealth of the population is significantly lower, and it is not even certain that you can find supermarkets nearby.
Same with health care, you can easily afford to shell out all the money necessary to have the care of a private doctor, but this service may not necessarily be there, because the people who can afford it are so few that a doctor would have no convenience in offering this service.
Living in a poor country, paradoxically, you can find yourself having a certain amount of money without being able to spend it the way you want. You also have to consider the possible extortion you would receive as a rich person in a poor country, the threats you would receive from other people, and the real possibility of being kidnapped.
On the opposite, living in a rich country as an average person you would be exactly like everyone else. You wake up, go to work every day, come home at night, and the years go by. Probably, if you live in the United States, you would go into debt to show yourself better than your neighbors (something like “dress to impress”), I recommend reading the book “The Millionaire Next Door” that talks about this topic, by the way.
A good compromise would be to live in a developed but not too expensive country, to retire to a quiet life when you have a certain amount of money.
For example, in earlier years in Italy retirees would move to Portugal (I’m not sure Portugal is still like that, considering the crazy rent prices there today) or to the coast of Tunisia, where they can find a favorable climate and lower prices.
So, you are so happy in your company that you decide to devote extra hours to work for free.
Next year maybe you will take a $1,000 productivity bonus and be disappointed because you thought you deserved more, if not even a promotion.
The CEO of the company will get a new house with his multimillion dollar annual bonus, and you’ll think you haven’t done enough, and you’ll continue to work above your abilities.
But I love my job!
Try to find a hobby that gives you as much satisfaction, something has to be there, you really risk burnout.
While we were busy unsuccessfully climbing the corporate pyramid, our family members, and our loved ones, were the ones supporting us in the shadows, and they will keep our memory longer after we die, until they die too. Make that memory at least a positive one.
But it’s only a temporary situation!
It’s never a temporary situation unless you make a clean break with the past, not only in this specific case but in any generic situation.
Separate discussion if, on the other hand, one is in a really lucrative field that is significantly better than normal work.
I give the example of the Software Developer: effectively if you move to California, Google and other big tech offer job positions that pay as much as $500,000 annually or more, provided you have a certain level of experience that few people can achieve.
Now, if a person decides to work for a predetermined amount of time (e.g. 5 years) in one of these well-paying jobs (or even being a C-Suite manager: CEO, CTO, etc.), and meets the deadline after that time is up, devoting himself to something else with the accumulated savings, and this effectively would be a temporary situation.
But it’s you who controls the direction of life, and if you have a certain influence by doing something, you almost develop an addiction to it, you live to have gratification from someone else.
John Doe: "The only purpose of human beings is to procreate as much as possible and generate other human beings who will spread our DNA"
What if this is our purpose in life? To create many small copies of ourselves to spread our genes?
Our friend Jonathan from the Netherlands followed Charles Darwin’s teachings to the letter and applied them to the modern world. Through anonymous sperm donation, he has delivered between 550 and 600 babies, making many more donations than normal to pursue his goal.
He did it so well that someone dedicated a page to him on Wikipedia and various newspaper articles around the world mention that a court has banned it from being able to make children anymore through this method.
Do you really want to go that far?
Humans are creatures composed primarily of carbon, by means of organized structures called cells grouped into organs. The main organ is the brain, which has no soul and perceives the world using chemical signals called neurotransmitters.
Thought itself is merely a chemical reaction.
God created Adam and Eve, who committed original sin. You are the descendant of this long dynasty of sinners, but God loves everyone for who they are.
When we die, the chemical signals gradually slow down, sometimes we have pre-death visions due to the release of DMT by our brain, and we believe we have seen some god speaking to us. The body dies due to the inability to continue cellular reproduction, and we become food for the underground bacteria.
Our soul ascends to heaven, and rejoins our departed loved ones. Life is not over, it has just begun; we left our mortal body to live in eternity.
You have lived a life in misery, and now you have become homo novus because of your faith.
Religion is the opium of the people
~ Karl Marx
Hope in an afterlife helps to alleviate people’s suffering in everyday life.
If you are not fully satisfied with your life, what can convince you to abandon it completely, forever?
Money? Nope, you are going to die, what would you need it for?
For glory? Mmmm maybe, in World War II Japanese kamikaze plane pilots committed suicide against American ships to make their nation great.
For a life after death where you end up alone with 72 virgin girls if you sacrifice for Allah’s holy war?
Where do I have to sign? ;) (just joking)
And this is how terrorist groups recruit people, on the large numbers surely someone believes.
And, at least in Europe, the fear of ISIS is still widespread, so much so that even my grandma knows this terrible name (seriously). Here are a couple of recent news stories:
137 deaths and more than 400 people injured.Religion’s role of psychological support for the mass of people inevitably leads to the accumulation of power and wealth, which will be enjoyed by the people at the top of it.
There was a funny episode of South Park about this and Scientology, btw.
The religions with the highest estimated amounts of assets belonging include:
200,000,000,000$. Not too far from the whole market cap of a company like Coca Cola, and both make people happy… :pAustralia alone were worth 30 billion $, and they have properties all over the world. Maybe they have reached the trillion (1000 billions) or even more after 2000 years of existence? :)Do we really exist?
Or were we created just to be the car battery of a random alien?
~ Rick and Morty Season 2