Zombieing around I see them, running in the mill I see them, drowning their misery in distractions I see them… I wonder if they even know they have more in them than this pointless existence. I think they have no idea. Oh yes, I know some of them believe they have found it – in family, in religion, in work… But then I understand they are just forcing themselves to believe it, repeating the words over and over in hope it will stick to them, it will make them happy like the ads promise, as the anecdotes show. But this salvation really never comes. So they struggle on, through pain, through depression, through misery.
“This fleeting feeling, I think I saw somebody having it! I’ll do whatever they did and then the Grail will bless me as well!” But to no good end. This is just the same drudgery all over again, harnessing yourself before a load you don’t want to pull. Struggling to stumble forward, teeth pressed together ’till they bleed, just in the hope of finding it…
And then giving up. “This is folly! No such thing can exist! The only happiness can be found in pretension! Life is never as good as the fantasy that is so readily conjured up for you! Live through the screens, be somebody else for a moment! Forget who you are! That is the happiness you can have! Easy to obtain, ever wilder, louder and more extreme!” They try, but still it keeps haunting them. You see it in the moments between the pretensions of a heartfelt laugh, between the adrenalin highs. You see that they don’t believe it themselves. That can’t be right, this can’t be as good as it gets.
It is not. They are right, it can be better. Yet they keep on waving off this alarm bell that keeps on ringing, they rather plunge into yet another new thing, more, wilder, bigger, louder – either a distraction from their goal or a false one – maybe this time it will work as they promised…
I am sorry for them. I think they have never known that they have potential for greatness, they have potential for this happiness they seek, more readily available and more intense than they have ever imagined. They just have to stop. For once stop! Shut off the distractions, shut off the mirages. Listen to the alarm bell. It has a voice and this voice is yours. It tells you – maybe in a child’s voice, if you stopped listening to it that early, maybe a bit older and more developed – where you should go to find this happiness you seek. You yourself can be the only one to tell You what You want.
Oh, it won’t be easy to get it. You have to struggle, you have to show strength, cunning and bravery. But this time this is the real prize, the only possible prize for you. This is custom design, designed by You for You. This prize doesn’t make anyone else happy, yet you’ll see others grabbing for it, hindering you, struggling to get it from you. But this time You have more power they have – you have the passion, you have the knowledge of what exactly it is and the feeling that this is for You, this is what is right and this is what you will obtain.
Once you shut off the distraction, forget about the false goals and go where the alarm bells guide you to. Please, discover, and then remember who you are.
liriel
My thanks to Hugh for reminding me every day of who I am. 
I think that it is written better than the previous one 🙂
Of course, as a philosophical standpoint I still think that this is arguable 😉 You seem to think that a person has sort of a natural state and we need to discover our own and follow it – people are happiest when doing what they are naturally inclined to do (this idea, I believe, is already there in Plato’s Republic) and a society has naturally a required number of people for all its different tasks. I’d like to believe that (that as a whole the Society or Nature actually knows what it is doing), but I doubt whether things are that simple. It seems to me that there are always contradictions between needs of society and needs of an individual, between needs of different individuals, between immediate needs and overall goals of a person. A group of people in a lifeboat, on a stormy sea need everyone to paddle, even when someone’s natural inclination is to write poetry. You’ll probably saying now, that immediate needs should not prevent us from following our life goals, but this is exactly what life is for most people – pursuit of immediate needs without any overarching goal. (Of course, I think that there are enough people who dream their whole lives about their grand Goal, without actually doing anything to pursue it). Ehh, life is complex…
I like it better, too 🙂
But, Lex, you are again thinking that I am talking about on society level but I am talking about personal growth. I think you cannot deny that people are the happiest when they are doing what they love to do themselves. I am encouraging them to do that despite it seeming impossible. Most things are not as impossible as they seem at the first glance.
I don’t think a poet would be very happy paddling a boat even though it is necessary and I don’t think he or she should shirk it. I don’t think that a poet should only do poetry and nothing else – he or she would have nothing to write poetry about in the ivory tower when they did (or only poetry about writing poetry about writing poetry…). I think a balance has to be found for everyone between immidiate concerns (the lower levels of the Maslow pyramid) and self-realization (the top end of that same pyramid). You have to arrange to have those immidiate concerns met as well as the means to do what you love. In the perfect world you can do those things at the same time – write poetry and make enough money with that to cover your basic needs. In real world you probably cannot – you might have to make compromises, you might have to sacrifice something… But it isn’t as hard as it seems, that is my point.
As for the idea that nature somehow arranges that there are enough people with suitable inclinations then I believe this is right – provided this is not a fixed inclination but developed with person, which means that a person naturally inclined to do rocket science can’t be present in an Amazon rainforest tribe. This is something that you develop towards, you find amongst the things that are possible for you to do. I do believe something evolution-like grants that there are enough people to do everything. Nature is too general a word to understand whether it is the same idea you refer to or not but I rather think not as evolution-like process can’t “know” what it’s doing.
And that life of “pursuit of immediate needs without any overarching goal” is too sad, I am trying to convince people that it doesn’t have to be that way.
It seems to me that for most of the history most human societies have believed, that there is some sort of “predestination” to humanity or Nature – that everything will work out in the end, or “balance out”, so an individual doesn’t have to worry about *everything* that’s wrong in the world. This principle has been named and explained in many different ways – Earth-mother, Tao, God’s Plan, World Spirit’s progress towards self-realization, harmonization of society with its system of social production, Gaia, cultural/memetic evolution, the Matrix 😛 etc. All these principles have a different “manager” and different character, but they have the common nomination that individual can safely worry about his/her own life and forget the big picture.
The question for me is – what if this is just a human weakness and we’d live better or survive longer when we all just thought somewhat more about the big picture? Perhaps there’s some very little thing in world that has to be changed, someone just has to think of it – like leaving the press-iron on. This is why I have this instinct to worry: the common wisdom is, that you shouldn’t worry about things you can’t change – but if you don’t think about these things, what if you miss something you *can* change? I’d like to believe into any one of these principles I mentioned above and then follow my individual inclinations – but what if there *is* no arranging principle and I should really be somewhere else, turning off some global or social press-iron even if this means denying my personal desires?
This sounds a lot less crazy when its just a feeling inside me. 🙂