Veritas

I am truly an edge case—I do not fit in any common definition of a normal person. I’m just a body with a brain moving on autopilot through this harsh world. It has been several years since I’ve been aware of the gaping hole at the centre of my being. While other people around me appear to have motivations, desires, and personalities, I have no coherent sense of identity, of who I really am. And instead of being sure of my self-image, I’ve always just pretended to be something I am clearly not. Right now, I am playing the role of a writer, whilst it is fully clear in my mind that I am not one. I find it hard to fit myself into labels that are so convenient for others, I am not a manly man, or a software engineer, or even a nerd, I am a mere consciousness floating around but never really landing anywhere. Books, video games, movies, television, and social media have aided me a lot, by allowing me to distract my attention from the ruins of my self. I have wasted tens of thousands of hours consuming content, if only as a mere means to take a break from consuming myself instead. As a result of this, I do not know how to do anything. The previous statement might feel like an exaggeration, but it is one of the most accurate facts of my existence. I can half-arse almost everything, but there is not one field I can call myself an expert in. Self doubt is the eternal companion that never leaves me. Multiple times everyday, I ask myself, what is even the point? Why bear all this suffering, if all of it is just for nothing? After all, death is bound to come sooner or later and erase all this: the mess I call my self, my aspirations, desires, or lack thereof, my emotions, my fears, and my ruminations. What is all this ultimately for then? Removing all our cultural fictions, and psychological preferences for a moment, and looking at human existence from a truly objective point of view, reveals that we are nothing but DNA’s way of replicating itself. All our drudgery is ultimately for naught because from the universe’s perspective we are nothing but tiny specks of chemically interesting dust. Our complete lifespan is a tiny flicker of consciousness that frankly does not even register in comparison to the billions of years that have already passed and the billions that will come to pass eventually.

Does it really matter then, if I absolutely suck at all the things my brain tells me I suck at, or if I am not a normal human being? If life is totally absurd and meaningless, then metrics for gauging my self worth like, how good I am at the things society tells me I should be good at, or how much I can stimulate the global economy, are not really objectively relevant. Nothing really matters! Most of the people around me would whole-heartedly disagree with me on this sentiment. But, I simply cannot reject a truth that is so self evident. From the moment we are born, our culture pushes us to worship certain ideals, institutions, norms, and narratives. And I am someone who has perpetually failed at being a real devotee. My perennial divergence from the norms laid out by society, is the reason I feel almost inhuman all the time. I’ve never fully allowed myself a chance to discover who I am, because the fear of being a failure in the eyes of others is too great. But, if nothing matters, then perhaps I can freely decide for myself what the meaning of my life really is. The sudden realization of the meaninglessness of life is quite liberating, it eradicates all fear and forces one to affirm life freely, but its effect is oft too transient and rare to actually change how one lives their life. For me, the weight of the external world almost always eventually outbalances the existentially induced sense of freedom. Existentialist philosophers say that humans are free to invent themselves. But are we really though? I usually have some control over how my brain makes me feel, but not enough to be able to function normally. No one really chooses where they are born and what culture they are dropped into. To say that a billionaire, and someone who does not have enough money to buy three full meals a day, are both “free” in the same sense, would be a very bad take indeed. We are never completely free of our social situations, and of our psychology. Most of the times our social and psychological conditions are too real and immediate, for us to exercise our freedom and invent ourselves according to our will. Can anyone make a completely free choice, unless they are all knowing and all powerful? How does one coincide the apparent meaninglessness of life, with the relentless weight of the world we live in?

The concept of radical freedom is a transcendental notion of freedom, according to which, even how we imagine the world is ultimately our own personal choice. An atheist and a religious person may experience the same external event very differently. What for someone is a revelatory spectacle, can be for the other, a fairly innocuous normality. Ultimately, neither one of them is correct or incorrect, because it is their own personal choice, how to interpret symbols into meaning. But it is something that they are fundamentally responsible for, because how they look at the world, shapes how they live their life. There are many situations in my day to day life, where I refuse to take responsibility of my actions, by saying that I had no real choice. Whenever I do that, I am in essence, lying to myself, because I am asserting that the way things are is absolute, and that my only option is to go with the flow. Most of us severely restrict our own freedom and self sabotage our lives by discounting what our options really are. We have been conditioned to be this way, especially people who are marginalized or disadvantaged. A poor person is frowned upon when they go even a little out of line, but the rich CEOs are encouraged to move fast and break things. A society as hierarchical and unequal as ours is unacceptable, because it prevents an individual from freely expressing themselves. I believe that no one person in a society is truly free until everyone is, but I am going on a tangent here. Well, the truth is that no matter my social or psychological circumstance, I still am free to create my own meaning, and to choose how I imagine the world, as long as I still have the power to even minutely affect how I interact with the world. I don’t need to assign myself labels, or to exhaustively define my self identity. I can be free and revel in my imperfections. Sometimes, when I am alone in my room, out of the blue, I find myself in a state of unwarranted optimism. I feel like experiencing life just for the joy of it, wanting to create stuff just because I can, and expressing myself directly through my art. When I’m in that state I feel like I have nothing to worry about, what is there to worry about if nothing really matters? If I can live life, and experience this wonderful universe and its beauty, why should I not?