We often live as if we know what living is about. We like to appear as if we wisely chose the life we have; as if we studied all the options, then carefully evaluated them before decisively saying “I made up my mind, I’ll take this one please.”
We behave like powerful demi-gods who fully comprehend their destiny, who perfected their skills and gathered their tools in order to achieve their goals. We practically have the power of ubiquity, we can be located in different places at the same time through magical communication devices. As if we can communicate with the gods themselves, we have access to all the knowledge in the world, or almost. We are these all-knowing beings with unlimited powers. At least we often see ourselves like this.
We pretend that wherever we are, this is where we meant to go. We desperately want to place ourselves above the terrible mess of the old poor world in which we unfortunately still live in. We desperately seek meaning, and we convince ourselves that we found it, or are getting close. Most of us live as if we were told the great meaning of life… or as if it was just plain obvious. Some people accumulate money, others sex experiences, some focus on perfecting their body, many have children, a career… People often confuse goal with meaning, but they’re usually fine with that. As if reaching your goals (or not) gave your life meaning (or not). But people can be fairly happy this way, ignorance is bliss.
We choose fuck all and we know fuck all, of course. Even the choices we believe that we made, so many of them actually depend on the circumstances: our culture, our environment, our location and time, our close ones… We kid ourselves thinking that we own our life, that we hold the steering wheel. We are laughably ignorant but we see ourselves as so much more knowledgeable than our ancestors for example, and this is true. We tend not to think about our descendants since we don’t have an easy mental representation for this, but they will naturally be so much more knowledgeable than us.
Most people simply prefer not to think about this, and just to follow the society-approved goal that suits them. It’s easier and there’s nothing really wrong with it. If we’re aware of this, then it might feel kinda wrong because we don’t like to be tricked, even by ourselves; we want to see ourselves as not afraid to face the truth. But this is another fallacy: this image of ourselves is our ego, the fake buddy that we invent to represent ourselves. There is no reason to make our ego brave (or anything else), in the same way that there is no reason to make our life an image of success. All these appealing features that we often envy in others and try to reach for ourselves are the equivalent of a carrot held in front of a donkey: a promise of future bliss which is actually an endless illusion. Notice that our consumerist society is very keen to dangle carrots in front of our faces.
I’m tempted to stop here, but as fascinating as it is, the path of nihilistic pessimism is just as fake as everything else: it’s a way to feel smart with a cheap form of intellectual consistency: it’s so much easier to consider that nothing is worth anything and everything is shit, rather than to dare searching for clues of love and beauty. This pessimistic way of thinking is guaranteed to always work because it (wrongly) uses any imperfection as evidence of its claim. One can get sucked into it like with a drug, it’s so tempting and easy to get a sadness high from it. This way, one can see themselves as the one who sees what most people either can’t or refuse to see, the one who dares facing the horrible truth of a hopeless world. All this is again delicious stuff for the ego, but nothing else. In fact, this thinking pattern is more or less the mechanism which drives depression and probably a serious cause of suicide.
So what do we do, then? Once we go over these obstacles, we reach the stage of the blank page: we don’t have a life goal that we must pursue, we don’t have an ego that we must feed through whatever intellectual or other means, we just have our life, our curious life.