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

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand
6 comments
Read more

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv
10 comments
Read more

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation
4 comments
Read more

Cats and Love

No less a psychologist than Freud said that the “time spent with cats is never wasted.” I find time to spend with cats precisely for that reason. They are not easy to love, particularly if they are the country variety which are not quite tameable, and mine are those. What makes my love affair with my cats special is precisely their unwillingness to befriend me. They’d rather be in their own company. “In ancient time, cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this,” Terry Pratchett says. My cats haven’t, I’m sure. Pratchett knew what he was speaking about because he loved cats which appear frequently in his works. Pratchett’s cats love independence, very unlike dogs. Dogs come when you call them; cats take a message and get back to you as and when they please. I don’t have dogs. But my brother’s dogs visit us – Maggie and me – every evening. We give them something to eat and they love that. They spend time with us after eating. My cats just go away without even a look af
8 comments
Read more