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
47 comments
Read more

Bihar Election

Satish Acharya's Cartoon on how votes were bought in Bihar My wife has been stripped of her voting rights in the revised electoral roll. She has always been a conscientious voter unlike me. I refused to vote in the last Lok Sabha election though I stood outside the polling booth for Maggie to perform what she claimed was her duty as a citizen. The irony now is that she, the dutiful citizen, has been stripped of the right, while I, the ostensible renegade gets the right that I don’t care for. Since the Booth Level Officer [BLO] was my neighbour, he went out of his way to ring up some higher officer, sitting in my house, to enquire about Maggie’s exclusion. As a result, I was given the assurance that he, the BLO, would do whatever was in his power to get my wife her voting right. More than the voting right, what really bothered me was whether the Modi government was going to strip my wife of her Indian citizenship. Anything is possible in Modi’s India: Modi hai to Mumkin hai .   ...
16 comments
Read more

Nehru’s Secularism

Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, and Narendra Modi, the present one, are diametrically opposite to each other. Take any parameter, from boorishness to sophistication or religious views, and these two men would remain poles apart. Is it Nehru’s towering presence in history that intimidates Modi into hurling ceaseless allegations against him? Today, 14 Nov, is Nehru’s birth anniversary and Modi’s tweet was uncharacteristically terse. It said, “Tributes to former Prime Minister, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru Ji on the occasion of his birth anniversary.” Somebody posted a trenchant cartoon in the comments section.  Nehru had his flaws, no doubt. He was as human as Modi. But what made him a giant while Modi remains a dwarf – as in the cartoon above – is the way they viewed human beings. For Nehru, all human beings mattered, irrespective of their caste, creed, language, etc. His concept of secularism stands a billion notches above Modi’s Hindutva-nationalism. Nehru’s ide...
14 comments
Read more

The Art of Subjugation: A Case Study

Two Pulaya women, 1926 [Courtesy Mathrubhumi ] The Pulaya and Paraya communities were the original landowners in Kerala until the Brahmins arrived from the North with their religion and gods. They did not own the land individually; the lands belonged to the tribes. Then in the 8 th – 10 th centuries CE, the Brahmins known as Namboothiris in Kerala arrived and deceived the Pulayas and Parayas lock, stock, and barrel. With the help of religion. The Namboothiris proclaimed themselves the custodians of all wealth by divine mandate. They possessed the Vedic and Sanskrit mantras and tantras to prove their claims. The aboriginal people of Kerala couldn’t make head or tail of concepts such as Brahmadeya (land donated to Brahmins becoming sacred land) or Manu’s injunctions such as: “Land given to a Brahmin should never be taken back” [8.410] or “A king who confiscates land from Brahmins incurs sin” [8.394]. The Brahmins came, claimed certain powers given by the gods, and started exploi...
15 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more