Years ago, maybe in 2018 or 19, on a random afternoon outside the college canteen, a friend posed me a simple question that has been on my mind a lot these years. The question was, what if you give it your all, invest unwavering effort, and after all this what if you still fall short of achieving your dream?
At the time, I dismissed it perhaps too arrogantly that such a thing would ever occur. My belief was plain and simple - if you truly did everything right, there would be no room for failure. To me, it was naively just cause and effect. If you didn't achieve your dream, maybe you didn't do it right, maybe you didn't work hard enough, or you weren't smart enough. Maybe I was too defensive about my own goals, and driven by my fear of failure among many others, I blurted out the dumbest thing I possibly could.
Or did I?
(cue V Sauce music)
I am trying a new thing - to be kinder to my past self. And yea, no matter how embarrassing and annoying I can be, I gotta get over it. Which means I'm gonna look at it and pretend it's not me and that it's someone else. Kidding, no. I need to own it. And to do that, it's not fair to just criticize my past self without understanding the perspective and reason why my thinking had been quite surface level and sometimes still is.
Good - I don't know what this word meant really. But I wanted to be it.
I wanted to be a "good" person. I don't even know why. Who wants to be on the side of justice, what a nerd. Anyway, this desire of being a good person, was more inclined towards being known as a good person, or rather to be more accurate - it was just wanting to be liked by people, and when I wasn't I just thought I'm not "good" enough. The "good" equating to an ideal form of a human being popular in all of society across all cultures I guess. I didn't have any definition of what it meant to be good and yet I was always disappointed in myself for not being good enough (which is good - character development baby - or is it? :hmmm: ). I wanted to be liked by my friends, my family, my girlfriend, my teachers, everyone really, why did I want that? - it's human nature shut up. I wasn't liked if it isn't obvious by now, at least I didn't feel like anyone really likes me as a person. I didn't even like myself. Any small disappointment anyone showed towards me grown out like a ripple and consumed my mind. And eventually it didn't take long for me to want to avoid the people I cared about hoping to never cross paths with them again in fear of embarrassment. Not that it excuses anything. At what point does awareness emerge?
Being used to the immediate response of a computer program telling me what I'm doing wrong, it became apparent that in human relationships I was doing everything wrong based on the lack of positive outputs. ANndd., I seem to have forgotten what kindness means. My past self is quite cool actually despite all of this - I'm now quite good at understanding and making software, and full credit goes to past self for that. Aight that's a lot for something offtopic, getting back to where I was. This just seems like needless rambling now.
The same cause that developed my need for being "good" - good enough to be liked people - is the same reason I so desperately wanted a direct correlation of effort to success. Computer programming has spoiled us. It gives us undeserved confidence that if we do everything right then the right results will follow. They don't necessarily.
The obvious problem with my initial response to my friends question is the lack of existence of a collective consciousness that everything in existence is connected to making it possible for a person to know everything everywhere all at once (i like that movie) and then a capacity to process all that information and choose the correct things to do all the time. This has been a missing feature since day one, not that I endorse it, but it could've been convenient. Anyway, before you take out your wooden pickaxe and start building this feature, be warned that it wont solve another core problem which I'll get to in a second or a minute or could be an hour too I don't really know your reading speed, assuming it's x words per minute and I don't know how much I'm going to write before I start with the problem but can I make a good guess..? Maybe - i don't care - or - um, what if I just write about it in the next sentence, so that I can just count the number of words I've written until then and ask the reader to divide it by their reading speed(x) to get the time it takes to reach the sentence or I can come back to this sentence later after I write the section somewhere far down and just write the number of words after this sentence. Nah, I'm not doing that. The problem of not knowing everything i.e. not knowing what's the right thing to do all the time is one of the most basic obstacles on the way to your goal. You can however do the most you can. This may not be enough but it can be enough based on your knowledge and reasoning abilities.
Will you be satisfied if you put in all your effort and then lose?
Does the fact that there's nothing you could have done to get closer to winning than what you already did comforting?
That hints us towards the "core problem" I was talking about earlier. This means you are not enough even if you put all your effort in. That to me isn't comforting, it's a bit daunting, and kinda cute, but it's still a loss and nothing gets solved - we can give up here and go home. Or we can just go home without giving up too. Let's keep our spirits up. Let's say we did pick up our pickaxes so they're fulfilling their purpose of being picked (that's how they got their name - someone picked up an axe and sharpened it a bit), and you build yourself the superpower to know everything there is to know and be the most rational person with infinite computing power in your brain, even then, there's a possibility that what you want simply isn't possible at all. A butterfly can't cause a hurricane. It can flap it's wings yes but, so what, I can flap my wings too. I can eat a butterfly, I'd like to see it flap it's way around that. Butterflies will butterfly but hurricanes are kinda big. Imagine air but like big and fast. Now imagine it bigger, and faster and more chaotic. Now imagine a butterfly. Are you a hurricane or a butterfly? As for me, I'm a human, or I try to be. We're all silly little things. Except me - I'm cool.
There's a story somewhere about a dude tasked to roll a boulder up a hill and each time he reaches the top the boulder rolls down again and he has to go back down and start from the beginning, or maybe that's an episode of Taskmaster. The boulder is rolled up and every time after a lot of effort has been put in, it'll go down again, and oh no Sisyphus needs to go down and get the boulder back up, is this hell? poor lad must be shaking and crying each time the boulder goes down, right? Right?//
This guy Camus with his ever present dimension crossing cigarette looks at the camera revealing he knew we were filming all along, and goes on to explain that Sisyphus in fact is not shaking and crying. The life of Sisyphus during this punishment is about finding meaning in his struggles, to embrace that there are somethings that are not in our control. To find happiness in our struggles. And should we kind reader live our life like this then?
We already don't know whether we're gonna win or lose, we can only try our best anyway, so why not just love the process or rather choose to do the processes we're inclined to love more often?