“Who are we? What is this? What is
the purpose of all this?”
This
genre of moody thoughts has haunted me quite a lot recently, and has wormed its
way into my mind and wrapped itself around each and every one of my thoughts
and actions. It isn’t just common teenage rebellious musings, or maybe it
is, I don’t really know (and neither do you, unless you know exactly what goes
in other people’s minds).
As
children, we are carefree and naive, untainted by society's demands! expectations!
reality!. We make up elaborate stories about trivial things and they become
true. The world is a magical place where anything can happen and anything we
dream of can happen and life is golden, even if we don’t know it yet. We
believe with authority that we can dig all day and end up in China.
But
as we grow up, we learn that the center of the planet is made of molten lava
and solid iron, and even if we were able to drill a straight tunnel through the
planet, we would actually end up in the middle of the Indian Ocean. This
realization is the first of many that taint our childhood dreams.
As teenagers, we lose the naivety
that made us believe in the unrealistic and the downright impossible. We lose
the comforting simple-mindedness that allowed us to find joy in now-meaningless
things like stuffed animals and digging to China. We learn that there are
certain things that we aren’t good at, things that we may even be complete shit
at, even though we were told otherwise by our teachers/parents/relatives/friends/authority
figures in the past life known as ‘childhood’. Our dreams may never become
reality because that’s how life works sometimes. The former gloriousness of the
world has become gray and crumbling, and we see through the things we were once
blind to. We look back on past events and realize the exact significance of
them, crushed.
We change so much throughout our
lives.
If
people are such transient beings, it makes me wonder who exactly we are. I
question what the meaning of life is every day, or if I even should be bothering to wonder what the
meaning of life is, and just let it be, à la existentialism, but I am now
also questioning if I will be questioning these things in 2 or 3 year’s time.
Do we lose this sense of
pointlessness as we grow older? Will I lose these occastional bouts of deep thoughts
about life and the meaning (or lack of) of life? Do true adults not think about
how pointless this all is? (You can’t sneak gold past Death, no matter how much
you try) Do people forget or do they just figure out that they have to forget
in order to become ‘successful’? (what is ‘success’ anyways?) Is that why we
end up bending to society’s demands and end going to university/findajob/getmarried/buyahouse/havekids/die
?
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