For most of my years on this Earth, my most significant goal and greatest intention was to hide my deepest, darkest existential thoughts as best I could – existential woes, feelings of meaninglessness, obsessing over the absurd nature of reality behind human existence. I had to hide them because facing them was too hard.
I’ve since found two harrowing truths on my own journey towards self-actualization and self-awareness. Hiding from these realities doesn’t solve them. Facing them head on doesn’t make them any less scary…or any easier for that matter.
Bravery should count for something in this world: looking inwards before looking outwards is perhaps the toughest road to take. Yet the greatest minds I’ve ever encountered and the greatest thoughts I’ve ever read have all come from teachers and thinkers who knew that truth lies beyond our egos.
We live in an age where information is at our fingertips, yet we can’t seem to learn from our past. For hundreds of thousands of years our species was simply trying to survive. We are a generation born into the luxury of modernization that allows us free time and free mental space to create, wonder, imagine and cooperate. So let’s talk about who we are and what we want out of life and why so much of the world around us has turned to shit. We owe it to ourselves and those who come after us to question how these worldwide norms and intrinsic power imbalances have created a system designed to exploit, disparage and dehumanize.
We don’t just have to regurgitate new age mottos or recycle the same philosophical quotes on our Instagram feeds; we can use rational thought and creativity and logic and humanity and humility and we can come up with new thoughts and new ideas about the world we’re in and the world we want to create.
Let’s talk about this shit instead of lying in bed at night keeping this inner turmoil held so tightly inside it doesn’t allow our eyelids to close until the sun’s coming up and another day of monotony is at our doorstep. We cannot allow bitterness to consume us. We cannot allow difficult roads to lead us to inaction. The first step is to look inward and to begin breaking down.
I hope you join me on this exploration of meaning, philosophy, morality, politics, norms, purpose, and anything else that pops up along the way.