No amount of brooding will describe what life is in its entirety. Sometimes people like me will sit down, face a blinking computer screen and think of some desperate thought to put order in what one sees. Everyday is an opportunity that presents itself. Although the same everyday mentioned will be perceived as a monotonous flow of hours and seasons, one should at least look at it squarely. I guess it’s not really the lack of better words, but it’s the ever present now. At times I can be in a different sort of place like beside our window and look out into the vast expanse of the world. I sometimes see dreams and visions, and right at the same spot I could think of noble thoughts and wonderful things to write about, but when I put myself in such a place like this, one so artificial and so mindless I lose those thoughts and seem to forget what they were.
Language provides us with that still and limited frame to realize what our thoughts have been brooding about. Not that all brooding is bad, but it’s what people perceive as the depressing aspect of thinking and brooding, of suicide and themes of loneliness and isolation. Our world as I see it is filled with wonder, the world made by civilized man, and the world of nature, pure unadulterated and unravished beauty. But it is also different-in the sense that man has somehow feel estranged at its sense of being so repulsive.
How can we be so alienated by this sense of familiarity? We grew up in an age so digitally connected that we earn a brand of archaism if we fail to live up to the fast paced demands of technological conformity. Every single being is somehow compelled by a ferocious media advertisement to purchase and thus be globally connected. From titanium cell phones to palm pilots to lap tops, gadgetry has never known so much variety. Add to that the psychology of asking the populace to have their personal needs met by this revolution.
Not that technology has been a source of all this evil, it is not! Let me clear it up. Erich Fromm and other thinkers have spoken against the depersonalization of the human race. We seem to be possessed by this mania, swept into this amusing bandwidths of images and sound bytes, losing altogether the “ancient” values of individual interface with flesh and blood relatives, the crumbling of ancient values. Technology seems to increase our frustration and impatience level. And there seem to be a relentless pursuit of the novel brands coming out almost every other week in the market. I know some people who seem to be in this train. Well, they must be pretty affluent to do it, or pretty restless with their new ones. I guess it’s because the one they have don’t after all meet their needs, and when they find one that seems to meet what they want, they are again in the pursuit of acquiring some more.
What occupies my mind at the moment is the futility of it all, the ever increasing numb feeling of emptiness and endless non-sense. Such phenomenon forces a person to lose himself and obey the fads of a capitalistic society. The poor grow poorer and eagerly desire the rich man’s comforts. The pauper is usually caught up in the same passion as the rich man. He seems to be mesmerized by the glittering trappings of the rich man, hi ever ensuing desire to renounce his poverty and pursue the so-called good life. It is universally known that for such to become a reality the pauper must work hard, get an education, and afterwards pursue a trade through which he gains financial compensation.
Perhaps it’s the unwritten rule in life that every soul longs to find happiness and the common man wants to do it by patterning his lifestyle after the rich man.
To find one’s niche in life, we have to pursue what we truly desire and desire was given to us to empower us. But the problem is what we desire sometimes doesn’t necessarily bring us the food for our table. When a man settles down as a writer, he can’t provide for every whim and caprice of his offspring or cruelly sometimes he couldn’t provide for the basic necessities. The wife then has to join him in the hunt and as such should share in major decision-making. When we reach this point we see man as caught up in the role of a father. What about his eagerness to be an author, a philosopher, or even a painter? Well that depends on the society he has found himself in. Sometimes his role is prized or occasionally dismissed (as in the philosopher’s case) as irrelevant and impractical.
What makes us happy? We might as become like hobbits in our search for it. Making life simple and plain. Laugh aloud, cry sometimes and work to break our backs. Happiness as one ice cream advertisement says “comes from the heart”. Of course we would prefer it were that easy. As humans we are strongly conditioned by our society’s situations including our penchant for what makes us happy. As early as childhood, we have adopted habits and manners that makes us preferably at ease and pleasure with some things. One man’s burden maybe another’s joy. A corporate banker may love to work in corporate settings but a carpenter would find his joy in the shop. A poet may have his heart with words while a baker is in love with satisfying his gustatory pleasures. Thus to each his own.
In this vast expanse of over-arching desires and ambitions, man finds himself living in a world that is so big. Therefore, he must look for himself lest he gets lost in this jungle of complexities. There is no choice but to make a choice: abandoning oneself to indecision is a decision itself albeit not a volitional one. If man doesn’t make that conscious choice he becomes a mere tool in the grand machinery of things…an insect in a universe of meaninglessness. Even though a vast amount of literature has been written already on the subject of angst and search for meaning, man has a continuing need to find inspiration in how he lives his life and as to what meaning he attaches to it. Themes of purpose, hope and divine destiny are profusely discernible in personal literatures. By personal I mean those that are written from a diary entry-like perspective, like this one. There seems to be a rich deposit of hope in the human spirit. A constant refusal to the acknowledgment of the hopelessness of it all seems unworthy of human dignity. Its just ineptly absent in the human core. The enormity nor the apparent impossibility of a situation should not overwhelm man, it should never devour him totally.
When I think about things like this, I recall Auschwitz and the killing fields of Cambodia. How has Man survived such deprave altars of human brutality? How is it that in the most inhumane situations, there is a refusal to surrender? On a superficial analysis, one could simply attribute these men’s survival to their devotedness to their faith, or their dignity but is it? Or is there something more? When Adolf Eichmann was set to trial in Jerusalem for his war crimes, Hannah Arendt documented the proceedings. She observed that through the constant conditioning of man to evil and savage philosophies, he emerges with a sense of banality towards evil. Eleonore Stump, an American philosopher, also observed that this “mirror of evil” makes us repulse from within and look at it on a deeper perspective. Ravi Zacharias, a contemporary thinker has narrated in an anecdote why this is so. He relates a question raised by a man so disturbed by the presence of evil in the world that he decides to abandon his faith in God. But if the person is so affected, so goes Zacharias, why isn’t he disturbed by the evil within? Stirring and quite sharp. He makes excellent sense. We, humans, complain against God about injustices and blame Him on how He runs the universe. The recent comic movie “Bruce Almighty” hilariously captures this enigma. Whenever we ask for some inconsistency about how things are happening in our lives ( issues of fairness, just compensation, problems that we can’t bear, etc.), we end up asking God that we could have known better.
While of course we cannot help but ask, out of the stricken conditions of our lives, we end up saying the wrong thing. We are looking for answers and in this search for answers we raise issues that have profound philosophical meaning. We want practicality to rule our lives, we wish for relevance and a consistent flow of things as we want them to be.
What do we want? We want lots of things-freedom form sickness, pain, guilt and we want justice to happen to every one. On the other hand such soul-searching attempts to ground ourselves amidst the meaninglessness of our days, we often find ourselves amused by society. Filipinos have a very good sense of humor and at most times we use humor to lessen the pain of our day to day experiences. We hate those in power, rant at the high taxes the government take from our pay slips and hear news of millions of pesos taken by corrupt solons and public servants. This daily dosage of cynicism and skepticism about how things are happening often times drive us to lose hope in our fellow men. To simplify things, all we want is a fair life filled with basic needs. We wish to laugh aloud with friends, enjoy the fruits of our labor and use our times the way we want it. Though often times we are frustrated by the realities of it all. That this country will never have a fair share of equity and progress. No wonder hosts of Filipinos have opted to go abroad where the grass is greener and where corruption (though never totally eradicated) is minimal and the basic need of every man is met.
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