Why do we need to live our lives to the fullest potential? I have done many things and achieved no real sense of satisfaction from them. I’ve become bored with pleasure and with pain. What does it really matter if you can achieve anything, help somebody else or believe in yourself?
Recently I have been trying many new things in the hope of discovering a new desire or something novel that I will find something worth pursuing and ultimately fulfilling.
I have worked for many charities as a volunteer; I have studied and practiced religions, finance and the sciences. I have utilized many of these tools and I’ve also developed good social skills that have helped me get better and better jobs right up to becoming a wealthy director of my own companies. To add to the conditioned social framework I have also engaged in creative pursuits like drawing, music, drama, authoring and sculpture.
Now I am not claiming to be the best in any of these pursuits. It’s important to me that I’ve tried them and experienced them for myself in my quest to discover something I’m actually interested in. Something with enough gravity to convince me life has any real meaning.
I am 40 now and I’ve had plenty of stimulation in my life. Everything from sex to drugs to rock and roll. I’ve engaged in public speaking and also in meditation and yogic breathing. I don’t want to do these things any more because they become totally boring in their addictiveness. I’ve experimented with sex and social relationships extensively and it all leads to boredom in the end. Especially when you’re making someone else happy.
The outcome of all these experiences I conclude to be pointless, apart from proving I am addicted to selfishness. I still draw a giant blank when I think about my life and everybody else’s. I think other people must be in denial if they think playing a violin, being a celebrity, preaching like a pope or running a country actually has a point in this vast universe. They’re all artificial and abstract. The only mean anything to the artificial fabric of humanity.
I mean we all engage ourselves in what are essentially meaningless activities for what reason? It only means something to us because we pretend it has. The universe doesn’t care about humanity or idea about meaning. Great stars devour and destroy each other all over the universe. If nature wants to eradicate us with something like a huge volcanic eruption or if we do it to ourselves with global warming or GM foods it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t matter if you are Mother Teresa, John Travolta, Tiger Woods, Mozart, Einstein or the nobody next door. Legacy ultimately stands for nothing apart from in the artificial minds of human collective memory.
Ultimately nothing is fulfilling to anybody because whatever you and your society create will be loved and hated at the same time. Think of everything; population explosion, war, religion, politics, capitalism, consumerism, GM foods, drugs, antibiotics, pesticides, consumerism. It would take 8 planet earths to give everybody the same lifestyle that we have in the developed world and I’m nowhere near happy. The fact that so many people are starving in Africa, India and Indonesia is because they’re growing food for us (those with money and power). Also because we’re turning their worlds into desert through deforestation and water shortages so they can grow crops to support our artificial way of life; for us to have furniture and fuel for our cars. What a pointless world? Even if everybody had equal access to resources the point of living in the grand universe is still pointless. We are all in this rat run working jobs most of us hate to buy things most of us don’t need. It’s a living nightmare. So we may amuse ourselves with gadgets and technology other human life gets ignored. So what’s the point?
Collectively we are doing a pretty good job of destroying the only known environment for our future generations so there’s no real purpose to our lives. Even if we did clean up our act for future generations, unimaginable events in the future are bound to wipe us out like the 99.9% of all previous life that existed on Earth that’s now extinct. The Sun stops shining one day and we’ll all cease to exist. If it’s all hopeless then our existence is futile so what’s the point.
Any advice out there for somebody like me or am I just mad?