'Come Cry on My Grave' Instinct

People do all kinds of their things, naturally, trying to make themselves happy. Let us see if we can summarize stuff people do in a set of few generalizations:

1. Learn some skills, trying to be the best in whatever they do, and accumulate attention and admiration as much as possible on the way. People do these stuff, naturally, to attract the best possible mate, and naturally, breed.
2. For those who are succeeded in gaining some extraordinary skills, but the skills they happened to choose, unfortunately, doesn't help them in getting the relatively best mate possible (video game champion, for instance), then they will simply try to go all the way as far as their own Symphony No.9. Poor Beethoven.
3. For those unlucky enough to gain any useful skill, they will simply, if possible, breed as much as possible.
4. For the unluckiest of all, no skill and no chance to breed, they just go home, and if possible, watch TV, eat junk food and get fat. Or the no less unattractive opposite.

That's pretty much what most people do, despite some statistically insignificant exceptions. The question is, what is it that people think can make them happy? Why do people imagine that breeding and being famous can make them happy?

What does breeding and getting rich or famous have in common? It is to have more people that potentially would respect and appreciate whatever crap we do. It is to imagine that there would be more people who would miss us when we're gone. To put it simply, most people have this simple equation of happiness:

Level of our happiness = c * (number of people crying when we die)

Where c is a changing constant that changes so much it is not a constant at all. So here we are all, collecting people to cry on our grave.

A Taste of Forbidden Fruit

I must have been around 13 years old the first time I tasted the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. I was raised in a Moslem family, so naturally the Creation story I was familiar with was the Koran version. I remember the feeling of uneasiness to have the feeling either something is wrong with the holy book, or something is wrong with me and other being of the same species that is human.

Basically the Koran version of the story goes something like:

1. God created man and woman, Adam and Eve specifically, to be the ruler of the earth of some sort, but God put them in paradise.
2. Noblest creature as they are, all angels and heavenly stuff supposed to bow before them. So they did, except our dear Satan.
3. So, Satan got himself damned for eternity for disobeying, and being pissed so satanically off, Satan swear to forever tease men to go astray. For a start, being satanically clever, Satan eventually lured our first ancestors to eat the forbidden fruit.
4. Being divinely pissed off, God banished them from paradise and cast them down to earth.

My problem was, my 13 years old reasoning couldn't understand: wasn't God made man to be the ruler of the earth in the first place? Why man had to sin first in order to go, when God, in full knowledge knew, that man was created to live on earth. My reasoning was: God intentionally created man to sin so that he can eventually rule the earth. Otherwise he would live happily ever after in paradise, and the earth would be empty ever after. Without ruler. How nice. No global warming and all craps people do.

20 years later or so, I still couldn't get it. Don't tell me not to take it literally. I don't. It's just a weird story. So, that was my first bite of forbidden fruit of reasoning. It was good. I haven't stopped eating ever since.

Glorified Greed

The obvious and easiest solution for any uneasiness in general, is hope. Hope for better condition, better days sometime in the future. With some kind of hope, the present unacceptable condition can become bearable, and people can have some kind of courage to try to make things better.

Hope for prosperity, hope for happiness, hope for peace.

A natural response to discomfort as it is, unfortunately, also is a misleading solution that will not be effective in the long run. Peace had never happen, nor there will ever be peace. There will never be general contentment, as there has never been such a thing.

Hope drives progress. But humanity has never been fundamentally progressed. Sure we go places (at the price of environment damage), we talk to strangers overseas, we see naked children dying instantly switchable to naked celebrities. But are we happier than the cavemen bonding around bonfire, honestly?

The answer is no.

So where is the progress? So what is the use of all these technological advancement that makes life supposedly easier? Most of we have now are mere excesses. The manifestation of basic human nature: greed.

Life is not fundamentally easier for most human, and will never get any easier. To say the otherwise is to close our eyes on history. There will always be war until there is nothing left. That is, no human left to fight with. The advancement of technology will finally make it possible for humanity to self annihilate itself. Congratulation.

Hope is an illusion. A painkiller for terminal cancer of the earth, humanity. As a matter of fact, hope is not only a painkiller, but also a stimulant for the disease. It does not make things better. It makes things worse faster, albeit temporarily bearable, like a good addictive drug it is.

The common misconception is that if there is no hope then we have no choice but to be desperate. Desperation is the sense of inability to motivate oneself to do actions beneficial to oneself, and to others. Ironically, hope is the major obstacles to actions that could genuinely have long-term benefit to humanity in general. We don't need hope to help each other. We just need to get up and actually help, instead of hoping.

Hope is nothing but a guilt-free glorified greed, gift-wrapped neatly. But it is, essentially, greed. And greed, the basic human nature, is what exactly makes humanity impossible to sustain.

The Most Terrible Thing

Your life is not about you.
If your life is about something at all.
It is about everything else but you.

It is about the world turning days into nights.
It is about the laughter of strangers living next door.
It is about the fair weather at the other side of the earth.
It is about great deeds of great people you don't know.

The most terrible thing in your life is,
that it has never been at all yours.
It is about losing,
things that have never been yours anyway.

The only less terrible thing you can have in your life is,
not to have you yourself in your own life,
but to have you, in other people's life.

Four Easy Steps to Become a Buddhist of Some Sort

Here you go, four easy steps to become a Buddhist of some sort:

1. Admit that you suffer, just like everybody else.
2. See that there is such thing as the cause of suffering.
3. See that this cause of suffering is eliminable.
4. There are such and such proven ways of elimination, but basically, it boils down to:
   

   just keep doing whatever you do, but stop, and i mean, STOP, thinking about it.

That's it. No new God to worship, no hell to punish you, nobody is wrong, nobody is right. In fact, there is nothing to believe in at all, just a set of obvious statements to ponder.