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

Pranita a perverted genius

Bulldozer begins its work at Sawan Pranita was a perverted genius. She had Machiavelli’s brain, Octavian’s relentlessness, and Levin’s intellectual calibre. She could have worked wonders if she wanted. She could have created a beautiful world around her. She had the potential. Yet she chose to be a ruthless exterminator. She came to Sawan Public School just to kill it. A religious cult called Radha Soami Satsang Beas [RSSB] had taken over the school from its owner who had never visited the school for over 20 years. This owner, a prominent entrepreneur with a gargantuan ego, had come to the conclusion that the morality of the school’s staff was deviating from the wavelengths determined by him. Moreover, his one foot was inching towards the grave. I was also told that there were some domestic noises which were grating against his patriarchal sensibilities. One holy solution for all these was to hand over the school and its enormous campus (nearly 20 acres of land on the outskirts
10 comments
Read more

Machiavelli the Reverend

Let us go today , you and I, through certain miasmic streets. Nothing will be quite clear along our way because this journey is through some delusions and illusions. You will meet people wearing holy robes and talking about morality and virtues. Some of them will claim to be god’s men and some will make taller claims. Some of them are just amorphous. Invisible. But omnipotent. You can feel their power around you. On you. Oppressing you. Stifling you. Reverend Machiavelli is one such oppressive power. You will meet Franz Kafka somewhere along the way. Joseph K’s ghost will pass by. Remember Joseph K who was arrested one fine morning for a crime that nobody knew anything about? Neither Joseph nor the men who arrest him know why Joseph K is arrested. The power that keeps Joseph K under arrest is invisible. He cannot get answers to his valid questions from the visible agents of that power. He cannot explain himself to that power. Finally, he is taken to a quarry outside the town wher
19 comments
Read more

Levin the good shepherd

AI-generated image The lost sheep and its redeemer form a pet motif in Christianity. Jesus portrayed himself as a good shepherd many times. He said that the good shepherd will leave his 99 sheep in order to bring the lost sheep back to the fold. When he finds the lost sheep, the shepherd is happier about that one sheep than about the 99, Jesus claimed. He was speaking metaphorically. The lost sheep is the sinner in Jesus’ parable. Sin is a departure from the ‘right’ way. Angels raise a toast in heaven whenever a sinner returns to the ‘right’ path [Luke 15:10]. A lot of Catholic priests I know carry some sort of a Redeemer complex in their souls. They love the sinner so much that they cannot rest until they make the angels of God run for their cups of joy. I have also been fortunate to have one such priest-friend whom I shall call Levin in this post. He has befriended me right from the year 1976 when I was a blundering adolescent and he was just one year older than me. He possesse
8 comments
Read more

Nakulan the Outcast

Nakulan was one of the many tenants of Hevendrea . A professor in the botany department of the North Eastern Hill University, he was a very lovable person. Some sense of inferiority complex that came from his caste status made him scoff the very idea of his lovability. He lived with his wife and three children in one of Heavendrea’s many cottages. When he wanted to have a drink, he would walk over to my hut. We sipped our whiskies and discussed Shillong’s intriguing politics or something of the sort while my cassette player crooned gently in the background. Nakulan was more than ten years my senior by age. He taught a subject which had never aroused my interest at any stage of my life. It made no difference to me whether a leaf was pinnately compound or palmately compound. You don’t need to know about anther and stigma in order to understand a flower. My friend Levin would have ascribed my lack of interest in Nakulan’s subject to my egomania. I always thought that Nakulan lived
16 comments
Read more

Octavian the Guru

Octavian was one of my students in college. Being a student of English literature, he had reasons to establish a personal rapport with me. It took me months to realise that the rapport was fake. He was playing a role for the sake of Rev Machiavelli . Octavian was about 20 years old and I was nearly double his age. Yet he could deceive me too easily. The plain truth is that anyone can deceive me as easily even today. I haven’t learnt certain basic lessons of life. Sheer inability. Some people are like that. Levin would say that my egomania and the concomitant hubris prevented my learning of the essential lessons of life. That would have been true in those days when Octavian took me for a farcical ride. By the time that ride was over, I had learnt at least one thing: that my ego was pulped. More than 20 years have passed after that and I haven’t still learnt to manage affairs in the world of people. That’s why I admit my sheer inability to learn some fundamental lessons of life. Th
8 comments
Read more