Unlisted

Featured image: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Land of Cockaigne

[This post is titled ‘Unlisted’, because I wasn’t going to throw it in with the rest of my posts in plain sight, plus I wasn’t going to share its link anywhere, what with the post being controversial and generally trippy-seeming and all, but in the end I thought, “Ayy, what the heck,” so this post isn’t unlisted anymore. The old title persists from my inability to come up with a new one.]

Dear Life,
Piss off.
xoxo
Sanika

That is my WhatsApp status, by the bye.

Life is inherently confusing, seemingly insignificant in the grand scheme of things and as a result, often, depressing. Many philosophers came to this conclusion or hit upon one of the stages of thought leading up to this conclusion after observing and ruminating on the world around them, and… er… “made their peace with it”. Examples of such people are Schopenhauer, Blaise Pascal, Kierkegaard, Gautam Buddha, Foucault, Camus, La Rochefoucauld, Sartre, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Edmund Burke, et cetera (in that order, from most to least saddening^[1] philosophies, according to me).

I know what you’re thinking: Ugh. Must this woman be serious all the time?
I assure you right this moment that this post is not going to be all serious and depressing. On the contrary, I intend it to be rather sprightly and freeing.

Another thing you might be thinking right now: The hell does a nineteen year old know about life! I have been around for at least <insert appropriate number> years more than she has. I know much more about life than she does.
See, now that’s where you’re wrong! Partially wrong, that is. Here’s how: A nineteen year old doesn’t know squat about life – correct, but you, who are older than me, know more about it than me – bullshit. Because nobody knows anything about life. Nobody understands life.

You (mockingly): Experience doesn’t count for anything, then? Huh.
Yes it does. Experience counts when we are talking about understanding reality. Reality is not the same as life. It’s different. It’s this universe^[2] we are stuck in. I say, “stuck in,” because there is no sure shot, a hundred percent definite, end-result-known way to get out of it… As Freddie Mercury quite aptly puts it in Bohemian Rhapsody^[3]:

Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality.

Reality is this unique combination of points in spacetime – of events – that has come our way – in which we have the Earth, the Sun, our moon, the stock market, the Indian government’s ban on two major currency notes, Donald Trump as the president-elect of the US, the Gregorian calendar, the splendid Taj Mahal, kind beings like Mother Teresa and Baba Amte, protons weighing 1.673 × 10^-27 kilograms. This is reality. Yes, it is tough to deal with, yes, it is random, yes, experience does count in it (that’s why, for instance, fresh-out-of-college, eager-beaver types aren’t made CEOs of companies). And yes, I know lesser about it and how to cope with it / live in it than do you, even if you are so much as a year older than me, because you have been around for a longer time and hence have more experiences under your belt.

Life, though… life is a completely different ballgame. Nobody understands it. I know about it as much as a street urchin does, or as much as Socrates did^[4] (who is a highly celebrated and highly dead philosopher).

It’s confused and confusing. It’s arbitrary, random, unpredictable. At one moment, you might be singing along to your favourite song on the radio, the next moment, you might be dead – could be a heart attack, could be that your car got hit by a truck, could be you were struck by lightning (no, wait, can’t be lightning, because I think a car will act as a Faraday cage) – the reason doesn’t matter, the bottom line is that you’d be dead. Now what did you do to deserve it – to deserve such a sudden, painful death? From most of you, the answer would be: “Nothing. I don’t deserve it at all.” Oh, but deaths like that one – deaths even worse than that one – do take place. Quite often, actually. So if life hurls that sorta shit at you, at everyone, all. the. time, then why do we strive to be friends with it so much?

We try to micromanage everything. We make daily schedules rife with productivity, activity and positiveness. We wedge in an hour of jogging before leaving for work each day and stop ourselves from ordering dessert while eating out because “A healthy life is the key to true happiness,” we’ve heard somewhere. We make plans for trekking on Saturday mornings and for partying Saturday evenings, because that one motivational poster said, “An active life is one worth living.” We try to meditate every once in a while too, because inner peace is also important, surely!
All of this – exercise, healthiness, activity, socialising, calmness and composure – we try to achieve in one go. It leaves us exhausted, anxious, tired. But we still do it, because we wish to please and woo Lady Life.
It’s like trying to keep a jerk of a partner pleased with you by giving him / her a dozen gifts on a single day, although you can’t really afford all those gifts. And at the end of the day, that partner of yours will remain whimsical and unpredictable and will still have the power to leave you without any warning, rhyme or reason.
Just the way life had, has, and will always have that power to unjustifiably walk out on you.

You won’t take such bullshit from another human, right? Then don’t take it from life either. Don’t shower it with presents by planning, controlling and doing everything, achieving every goal, all at once. Give yourself time, go at your own sweet pace. Don’t flatter life. It doesn’t deserve to be flattered. This is my point.

It is possible – probable even, given my history of being mercurial and indecisive – that I will not have this view a year from now. Maybe I’ll disagree with it so much, that I will angrily pull this post down, embarrassed by the ignorance of my former self. Till then, however, till the time I firmly believe in what I have just typed out, I shall keep on insisting that it is the absolute truth. Such is the nature of man.

And here, the faces of my readers, hardened with age and hardships, have become harder still. Their thoughts are rearing their heads again: What does she know about life? Who is she to talk about it?
Hence, I’ll shut up.

Let me leave you with a quote. It’s not witty or anything, nor is it attributed to anyone famous. In fact, it was written on one of the T-shirts I had as a kid. It goes something like this:

Don’t take life too seriously. You won’t come out alive anyway.

Cheers!

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Footnotes:

^[1] If you listen carefully, you’ll be able to hear Epicurus turn in his grave at this point.

^[2] I have a feeling that I made many a Physicist cringe by using the word ‘universe’ in the wrong technical context.

^[3] Which is only, like, the best song EVVAH.

^[4] He admits to this when he says, “The only thing I know is that I know nothing.” Appreciate the honesty, man.