I guess everyone has a hard life.
Or is it just me?
I assume not, because I think that everyone has their own experience to face and as such, is going to suffer from the human condition of weighting negatives more heavily than positives. And because there is no such thing as no negative and most people have an average experience, people are more likely to highlight the negatives in their lives, and remember them. People will remember the lesson of losing 20 dollars before they remember winning 20 dollars.
The last few years or perhaps, the last few decades for me have been a typical mixture of highs and lows, with a lot of average between. However, if I were to tally them all up, I suspect that the lows might outnumber the highs, and perhaps, the lowest of the lows have not only been heavy, but highly impactful and terminal. Well, terminal in the sense that they are going to affect me for life and nothing really good comes out of it.
I don't know about you, but I often think that we are destined for failure in life, even though as a species we keep advancing. Perhaps it is this sense of impeding failure itself that keeps us advancing, as we try to overcome the challenge by creating something meaningful. But, for the most part, the majority of us aren't going to succeed in that endeavor, and will fail to make much of a difference at all in the evolution of humanity.
Perhaps that is why so many become dicks.
There seems to be a lot of dicks in the world now, and I think it comes down to a new high in entitlement on one hand, and a new low in the sense of community in the other. A lot of entitlement becomes a high level of selfishness. And low sense of community means a loss of connectedness. For hundreds of thousands of years we have built our personal meaning from a sense of adding value to the community in which we live, and in the last few decades, we have decided that it is better to just be in it for ourselves.
How's that working out for us?
The quest for "meaning" in my opinion, is actually a request for relevance. But, how to be relevant in a world of individualism? And this is what many people are struggling with, even though most don't seem to have spent much time thinking about it. Instead, most of chase relevance in the world of strangers, whilst our local communities go begging for support. And since they don't get much, they fall apart, making local experience even shittier, with more people become dicks.
It used to be "think globally, act locally", but it seems to be more shout globally at strangers, ignore the people you know. Many people argue against me when I say things like that, and it is fine, but I am yet to see much evidence to the contrary. The world narrative is led by the outspoken few that are supercharged by the media and algorithms, incentivized by fame and fortune. And as behavioral economics tells us, incentive drives behaviors.
A lot of happy people leak a lot of sadness.
Over the years I have interacted with a lot of people who talk about how happy they are with their lives, but again, I am yet to see much evidence of this. Rather, I see them leak their discontent, either in the looks they give others who have what they wish they had for themselves, or their behaviors that indicate that all is not well in their lives. People who talk about body positivity but speak badly those who are in better shape than themselves. Or people who say that money doesn't matter, but complain about the price of groceries.
It leaks from people in many ways, just spend some time observing and conversing.
But as said, we all have shitty lives, which is probably part of the plan to keep us trying to advance. If the world was perfect, if our lives were perfect, why change? And if we aren't changing, we are stagnant, unmoving, dead. And perhaps this death is what we are trying to avoid, knowing that it is inevitable, so we instead try to do something meaningful to leave behind in our wake. Something to remember us by, immortalize ourselves in some way.
To cheat death. At least for a while.
But, we will all be forgotten in time, no matter what we do. The inventor of the wheel is unknown. As is the first person to make a boiled egg as a meal. All of us will be lost in time and forgotten. But, all of us will also have left a mark on the world past us, even though no one will mark it on our account.
Life is simple, isn't it?
What happened to just being a good person and adding value to the community? What happened to helping others improve their lives and in so doing, getting help in return? Why so much fucking drama all the time? Instead of positive impact being the measure of success, it is now all about grabbing attention.
As if attention equates to relevancy.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]