In the game of life, where we all sit around awaiting our deaths, we often feel conformed by the actions of those around us. We stray from our hobbies and passions to mold ourselves to fit the pretense that the world around us creates. We are tethered by thoughts of family, the environment we inhabit, and friendships where the feeling of altruism is not always reciprocated. We become a subset of our surroundings, chaining those of us who are mutually exclusive inward.
Eventually, we all experience that awakening -where we realize the passions that once defined our very character and ignited our souls. In this very epiphany and revelation we are prompted between continuation and a premature termination, in which the perpetuation involves constant suffering, leading to some form of crazed genius, while in the cessation of the constant chase of meaning, we often experience true feelings of happiness.
Just as Skinner believed that behavior is shaped by the environment, we often react by constructing an internal world of our own. In this world, we adopt an idealized view of life—optimistic if we’re deluded enough, pessimistic if we’re influenced enough.
It takes a form of delusion to be happy in a world that demeans the ordinary and attracts us to the fabricated image of a perfect life. This creates a population of unhappy, non-creative followers, where entrepreneurship becomes a goal in itself, rather than a natural byproduct of passion and ingenuity.
We are constantly engaged in the Game Theory, not realizing that we’ve based our entire idea of success on paper rather than innovation. Too often, we sacrifice our happiness for a meaningless symbol, creating a generation of followers who deepen the divide between the Lumpenproletariat, the Vagrants, the Tycoons, and the Plutocrats. In where we are controlled by our data, distracted by it, and exploited by our weaknesses which mold us into their vision of conformity.
As this excerpt puts it:
”My life is a burden, because I taste no pleasure, and because, for me, everything is wearisome. My life is a burden, because I live, and must probably always live, with men whose thoughts and manners are as different from mine as the silver moonlight is different from the light of the sun. I cannot, then, follow the only manner of living that could make life bearable for me, whence it follows that I feel aversion for everything.”
Samnehs Blogs 