Life is inherently meaningless. Our only design and function is to stay alive and generate offfspring. And some might say that this notion is untrue, that we as human beings have so much more to live for. While this may also be true, these things are entirely man-made.
We have created our world and everything contained within it. Our technology, our governments, our economies, money, and even our emotions. While all of these things are beautiful by design, they are the root of all stress. We limit ourselves by what we can comprehend of these subjects.
All the pain and suffering in the world is due to this fact.
The key to breaking free of this vicious cycle is something that has been take from you slowly, over time. By the time we've reached adulthood, we seem to lose sight of this tool given to us, our imagination. If the world is limited by imagination or he creation of new ideas, then it is all that stands between us and progression as a race.
If our world wasn't so concrete, then it would by nature become more lucid.
I believe that this process of simplifying our minds can be reversed
You see, our brains have grown more logical, and more efficient as we have aged. We have become more and more like machines. We have lost our originality and our uniqueness.
In society being "different" is a negative thing. Yet each and everyone of us is created as such. As a child, because you don't understand the intricacies of modern day human culture, you possess a certain degree of ignorance, that diminishes as you age.
They say ignorance is bliss and they weren't wrong
As a child, you are able to create anything, at least in your mind. This is because you don't know what is impossible, you are free of this limiting notion. Society says that children are our future. But only because they are eventually going to possess the same boring positions and assume control of the same planet with its simple minded nations.
If they are supposed to be the future, and they are to solve all of the problems that we've created, then why simplify their minds?
These concepts and institutions that we have created have in turn backfired on us. These things like school, television, government, and the mainstream media have molded us into something other than human.
So the question remains, how do we break free from this mechanization of the human culture?
I believe that the answer does, in fact, lie with our imagination.
You see, we have hit a brick wall of sorts in terms of advancement. When people think of progression they tend to pay attention to matters of physical technology. They believe that with certain inventions, we are able to evolve and control our world.
This is what I would call linear progression. At this point in time, we are only able to improve technologies that already exist. The last great invention was perhaps the internet, right? (Even then its just a more massive version of a network, accessible from anywhere) Yet that was more then twenty years ago. If you look at the advances of the industrial revolution and into the twentieth century, you see a more horizontal progression. This means that we were able to create new technologies and concepts that never existed before at all.
Can you see the trend yet?
In reality, we need to advance in a whole new way. This advancement is not of corporal matters, but of doctrine.
You see, John Lennon once asked us to imagine.
His message could not have been more clear. All pain is created by man. Yet, picture a world, where this is not true. How can we advance when all we do is harm each other in an attempt to compete amongst each other?
What we really need, is to work together. What if the space race never happened? If instead it was the great space collaboration, might we be outside of our own galaxy, the milky way, now?
Competition is like a game of rock, paper, scissors. You need to constantly change to gain an edge on your opponent, exploiting their weaknesses and utilizing your own strengths. Yet either win or lose, the game never really changes
Instead we need to put our resources, information and tools together, and build a rocket to take us to wherever it is we want to go.
This notion of competition has been conditioned into our minds. We are taught at an early age that wining is everything. Maybe it is.
Regardless of what you believe, the data shows one correlation. People who competed in Sports or other extra curricular activities tend to be more successful. This is especially true in the business word, where the vast majority of CEO's have some history in extra-curricular activities, especially at the college level.
Yet, how should we define success?
If it is acquiring property and currency, then there are many successful people. But how is it so if acquiring possessions it the easiest thing to accomplish in this life. Think for a second, its my understanding that if you are decently intelligent, you can be whatever you set out to be in this material world. All you need is to put in the work because money is readily available and yours for the taking.
And humans have the tendency to want to compare and quantify their belongings. So again, competition drives us from what really matters.
I would instead argue that success is happiness. They say money can never bring happiness. In my own life, I've found this to be true. While money can be fun, and I've you a sense of euphoria, it always fades with time.
So why define success with a finite concept?
It wasn't always like this. Native American tribes for example, instead defined success, not by how many things you owned, but by how much you were willing to give away.
Something has changed our minds about this concept of life.
You see, the 'upper class' relies completely on this fact because without our own motivation to acquire physical belongings, they have no labor nor any consumers.
Yet how can we expect this to be sustainable with this notion of profit? If large companies are making copious amounts of money, then by nature there must be someone losing the limited resource.
This group would include all the rest of us. The middle and lower classes receive the brunt of the attack. And now the middle class is getting squeezed out all together. Soon there will be two classes alone, those who have and those who don't. You can imagine who would win such a fight. Whether if by land or sea, reason or war, the outcome shall never be kind to the weak.
We must break free of every concept that limits us to a life of normality, because that is what will spell the end of humanity as we know it.
To fix a problem you must recognize that it exists first.
We are addicted to the the life that we have access to. This is how society is able to control us. Most people enjoy the objects that they have. While I can't simply rest the blame with them, we must realize that those commodities tend to blind us. We see less and less of what goes on around us, and instead focus only on what happens to us.
Even in our own lifetime we can see the damage that has been done to our environment as well as our quality of life and well-being.
There are very few places left on Earth that are completely untouched by human influence. In some way or another, nature has been modified in a way to benefit humans. So much so, that it has been essentially destroyed along the way and ceases to be what it has always been.
But equally important, we have begun to change socially speaking at an alarming rate. People have become less attached to the real world and more reliant on electronic interactions on social media. So much so that in a quest for likes, we have become increasingly distant from the things that truly matter in our lives.
This sounds almost identical to a drug addiction because thats exactly what it is.
We would hate to admit it, but our addiction to social media, television and everything els, has begun to control the fundamental way that we live our life. yet at the same time, we have become blind to how it has affected us as well as our surroundings.
As long as this feeling of euphoria lasts, no one will ever work to free us from this problem. We are all addicts and so we have no one to help us to see what we have become and what we've allowed to sustain our addiction. Instead we must ourselves decide to make change happen.
You see, we must completely change the way we see things instead of merely modifying our world. The latter can only push back the end a little further. To make this happen, we must, as drug addicts, find something else to make us happy.
As long as you can die contently, then what does it rally matter what you did with your life physically?
People, especially in the western world have completely forgotten this concept. It's as if success is the only way to achieve happiness in today's world. Or at least that the picture that media paints.
Now I'm not going to tell you what happiness is because I believe its different for every individual, let alone the fact that I, myself, am unaware of it's true source.
The point is, you need to see past all of the media, and pressure, and past all the stars, and blackholes, and past every bit of outside stimulation, and instead directly into yourself.
Its the only place where the answers are never false, because its the only place that you truly exist.
John Lennon asked us to imagine, now the torch has been passed and I now ask of you, imagine.
