Skip to main content

Why live?

An average person is more likely to kill himself than be killed by terrorism, illness or accidents. 
  
Source
Source

Life is pain, said the Buddha.  Why to live then?  That would be the most fundamental question if we accept the Buddha’s enlightened truth.  Philosophers like Albert Camus wrote treatises on why we should live in spite of the pain, absurdity, or sheer ridiculousness.  The treatises are individual responses to the question about the meaning of life. 

Each individual has to discover his/her own answer to the question, I think, unless one is satisfied with the readymade answers given by religions or such systems.  If suicide is the largest cause of death in the world, one implication is that there are too many individuals who are not able to find religious or similar readymade answers meaningful. 

One of the basic biological facts is that life tends to sustain itself in spite of all odds.  Plants and animals will keep struggling against heat and dust and all sorts of oppressive conditions in order to live.  Yes, to live.  Life is pain, the Buddha was right.  Life is a struggle, a constant fight against oppressive forces. 

The struggle is the meaning of life.  The struggle is the essence, Albert Camus showed us through his brilliant essay against suicide, The Myth of Sisyphus.  Life is the rock that Sisyphus carried uphill with an indefatigable spirit which rebelled against the god who gave him that life.

Rebellion was Sisyphus’ meaning of life which Camus accepted.  Control of desires which cause the pains of life was the Buddha’s answer.  Experimenting with truth was Mohandas Gandhi’s way.  Different people discover their own causes to live for and meanings to sustain themselves against suicidal tendencies.  “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how,” as Nietzsche put it famously.

The why is an individual choice which may be as commonplace as bringing up children and seeing them becoming successes in life or as esoteric as discovering formulas like E = mc2.

How do you know that you are somewhere on the right track?  Psychologist Erik Erikson has an interesting set of criteria for the different age groups to check the rightness of our progress.  An adolescent who knows what he wants to become and works towards that goal is on the right track, Erikson said.  The failure struggles with identity crisis.  The adult who has understood the meaning of love and is able to establish comfortable relationships with people who matter to him/her will not be buffeted by suicidal thoughts.  The failure in this age group (20 to 40) will experience isolation, loneliness and possibly depression.   Those in the next group of 40 to 65 years become very caring if they are on the right track.  The failure experiences stagnation, a feeling that he/she didn’t achieve anything much in life.  Beyond 65, the successful person is a wise person in Erikson’s view.  Wisdom enables a person to look back on life with a sense of satisfaction.  Otherwise life is accompanied with feelings of guilt about past or a sense of despair. 

That’s just a kind of checklist and nothing more.  Ultimately, we discover own meanings and purposes for life.  It is important to discover them.  The rising suicide rates indicate that much at least.



Indian Bloggers



Labels:

Comments

  1. Alok singhalDecember 27, 2016 at 8:36 AM

    Very true. I guess with all the advances we talk about, our expectations have increased thus increasing our unsatisfaction!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 27, 2016 at 11:06 AM

      All the advancement is taking us away from ourselves to illusory and elusive objects presumed to be sources of happiness.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
44 comments
Read more

Florentino’s Many Loves

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail. “I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says. All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The
62 comments
Read more

Country without a national language

India has no national language because the country has too many languages. Apart from the officially recognised 22 languages are the hundreds of regional languages and dialects. It would be preposterous to imagine one particular language as the national language in such a situation. That is why the visionary leaders of Independent India decided upon a three-language policy for most purposes: Hindi, English, and the local language. The other day two pranksters from the Hindi belt landed in Bengaluru airport wearing T-shirts declaring Hindi as the national language. They posted a picture on X and it evoked angry responses from a lot of Indians who don’t speak Hindi.  The worthiness of Hindi to be India’s national language was debated umpteen times and there is nothing new to add to all that verbiage. Yet it seems a reminder is in good place now for the likes of the above puerile young men. Language is a power-tool . One of the first things done by colonisers and conquerors is to
14 comments
Read more

Diwali, Gifts, and Promises

Diwali gifts for me! This is the first time in my 52 years of existence that I received so many gifts in the name of Diwali.  In Kerala, where I was born and brought up, Diwali was not celebrated at all in those days, the days of my childhood.  Even now the festival is not celebrated in the villages of Kerala as I found out from my friends there.  It is celebrated in the cities (and some villages) where people from North Indian states live.  When I settled down in Delhi in 2001 Diwali was a shock to me.  I was sitting in the balcony of a relative of mine who resided in Sadiq Nagar.  I was amazed to see the fireworks that lit up the city sky and polluted the entire atmosphere in the city.  There was a medical store nearby from which I could buy Otrivin nasal drops to open up those little holes in my nose (which have been examined by many physicians and given up as, perhaps, a hopeless case) which were blocked because of the Diwali smoke.  The festivals of North India
50 comments
Read more

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so
39 comments
Read more