The human condition is both sublime and base, soaring in its possibilities and tragic in its realities ... it is also just a bit humorous, when you get to know it well enough. We are staggeringly complex creatures, each unique, each capable of creating and experiencing beauty, joy, and love, yet each also capable of hatred, bigotry, and the callous indifference to suffering possible only through ignoring others' humanity. You must learn to recognize these tendencies in your heart and mind. Tend towards the former when you can. And seek to inspire the same in those open to your influence.
The conditions of life on this earth grind many of us into a miserable physical existence. And even for those of us who are materially better off, the widespread misery and apparent hopelessness of so many causes psychic damage. Yet almost all of us - including those least able and most disadvantaged - continue living, often with great zest. This begs some explanation - a mere fragment of which I am able to understand myself and share with you.
Surrounding our whole predicament is an aching, inescapable burden. Intelligent and informed people who are honest with themselves know it beyond any reasonable doubt. For them it can be a wellspring of energy, curiosity, even purpose but also a terrifying, engulfing, annihilating void. Many others likely suspect its existence and could discover it with more curiosity. A host of others are either oblivious to it or in denial, certain of a revealed purpose and order, and a lot of other nonsense besides.
The burden is a simple, fundamental, perhaps imponderable, question - why. The question takes varying forms: why not nothing? Or why this particular something? Or why me, today? As common and seemingly banal as these might seem, they are not trifling questions. Because we are conscious of the world and ourselves as we actually exist, underlying each of us and all we do is a chasm of maddening darkness - it is where that spark of self-awareness that makes you human escapes to when you decide there is no purpose in life. Most of us manage to ignore it or convince ourselves that its not there - some genuinely don't entertain the possibility that such an abyss exists. But it is there - and it cannot be ignored if you are to make the most of the life you have to live as a human being.
Perhaps, it is fear that the void is all too real and inescapable that pushes us, that moves us further forward, upward, outward. Perhaps, it is the knowledge that maybe there could be no ultimate purpose, that we are inconsequential, accidental, floating adrift with nothing of permanence behind or ahead, and with only our seamy, chaotic life churning all around, that inspires us to inquire, learn, improve, and then do it all again. Perhaps, it is all that keeps some of us interested in life - and indeed, alive. Strip away you, your mother, everyone and everything of significance to me - a loss that would be incalculable - strip away this all, and I would still flee from this maddening darkness, I would still seek meaning, though I would have lost the most precious source of meaning I had ever known, son. I would not succumb to that darkness. Do not ever let yourself succumb.
Perhaps this will help you to understand ...
Imagine you see yourself standing on Earth - anywhere. Your view can zoom out, away from yourself and take in progressively larger perspectives, progressing to encompass the whole of the Earth ... then on to the Solar System, our local neighborhood in the Milky Way, our entire Galaxy, the local cluster of galaxies, the Universe, everything that has ever existed. Zooming back into Earth, you are aware of the lives of those you know personally and you can empathize and come to an intellectual understanding of the lives of those whom you don't know, but exist all the same. You can imagine life as our ancestors lived it, not just those recorded in history, but also our deep ancestors. You reach back towards the boundaries of early human experience. You also peer ahead, and you can wonder at what might be.
You can never be everything to all people, you can never go to all of these cosmic places, and you can never know all that there is to know, but from the icy stillness or warm intimacy of the perspectives you choose you can grasp a few important things about YOUR life, about YOUR world, and about YOUR kind that are indispensable to an examined, fulfilling life. You will know in a visceral way goodness, fairness, what it means to do something in the public good, what it means to be altruistic ... you will know empathy ... you will also understand the narrowness and parochialism of so many people's actions, and you will understand why they don't see the world like you do, like I have, like everyone can. And it will move you to do great things.
