(the following entry is a lot of rambling and needs editing. read at your own peril.)

Life is like a massive RPG. It is well and truly free-roam; there is no central storyline or clear plot. There is no certainty as to what your mission or purpose is, though there are many who would claim that they know. It’s ridiculous to believe any of them, the same way it is ridiculous for men born on an island to claim that they know for certain what lies beyond the ocean. Existence is temporary.

At some point in time you will cobble together a working understanding of life and the universe- a weak idea of how minuscule we are, and how nothing is really quite certain or significant in the grand scheme of things.

When we begin, we are aware of our fundamental needs: air, food, water, warmth, & shelter. This is the same for every living creature. What seperates humans from the rest, as defined by modern philosophy (which is in fact, if you think about it, really young in the context of human history) is our ability to think, and to reason.

We’ve been around for about 30-40 thousand years, been thinking deeply for about 5 thousand years. Our gut instincts, the internalized rules that we have as human beings that we cannot really explain sometimes, are a product of evolution
they have helped our ancestors survive natural disasters and predators and all sorts of things.

They have grown redundant in the modern world where our lives are dictated not entirely by our natural environments but by humanized ones. Evolution naturally explains why men started to think deeper than before, study social dynamics, and developed reason. It’s a standard of all forms of development- a differentiation formed out of a generalization that was more successful than the alternatives.

Essentially, as mankind moves from hunting and gathering to agarian and industrial civilizations, and now to the information age and beyond, the development of logic and reason to guide our minds is an evolutionary advancement, much like how men with bigger brains outlasted, outwitted and outlived great apes despite the cost it had on everything else.

We are mostly so bogged down by the little details of mundane everyday life that we forget about the bigger picture- that natural selection is happening all around us in every form of every class of every society and every race of every living thing in the history of existence.

The difficult thing for intellectuals and idealists is to understand the POINT of existence. Fundamentally we can understand that there is no clear distinct point or purpose; Religion’s answers are vague and inconsistent. Our lives are temporary,
and so fleeting! We’re here, and we’re gone. When you sit down and try to wrap your mind around it you realise that existence is honestly, ultimately, futile in the grand scheme of things. We all don’t really matter in such a massive context, nothing really does.

Most of us have come to this point. A large percentage of people go through their daily lives, live and die without even thinking about it. A significant group of us are aware, and remind ourselves that we are going to die someday. Watching military conflicts, economic ruin, poverty, falling in love, all sorts of things- make you realise several things. Nothing is absolutely certain. There is no right or wrong.
Some things are still more certain than others. We are all accountable to ourselves.
The world is fucked up.

Yet sometimes little moments of kindness, etc. show that it’s not as bad as it seems.
Still, at some point in time you realise that the world is much larger than you are
and everything goes on without you. If you or I disappeared tomorrow, off the face of the earth, the world would go on. This is a very painful truth to accept, but it is also a very important one. Living your life without acknowledging this truth is living a lie. At this point we should also acknowledge that the primary goal of every living thing is self-preservation.

What can i do in this world, and why would it really matter what I do, when ultimately everything seems futile? What’s the point of working hard at what we do?
When you look at self-preservation, and then at the fleetingness of life itself, it can seem really, really ridiculous to be concerned about stuff like exams, grades, politics, being popular, material wealth.

Perhaps it’s a sense of control- you can do something about your exams, or watching tv, or getting laid, and it gives you fleeting satisfaction. However you have to realize that all these things do not actually do very much in helping you preserve yourself, your entity. Now we know obviously that physical immortality is impossible (at least, given current medical science, and considering all the moral dilemmas that would prevent much progress towards it)

But think about it a little more- Who’s the most immortal person that you can think of that you have personally known? For me, it’s the drummer of a local band- Wayne “Thunder” Seah. He passed away several years ago, but he lingers on, in our music, in our minds, in our thoughts, on the internet, on youtube, in the impact he has made on his peers, and his family. When my generation dies out, that would be gone too. But every generation leaves its footprint on the next. If Wayne had in any way inspired anybody to live better lives, and these people in turn inspire others- raise their children better or whatnot, in essence, wayne will live on in THEIR progress. Socrates for instance got killed for what he believed in, but he inspired plato and his other students, and he lives on to this day by representing an idea. Ideas, as V (from V for Vendetta) said, are bulletproof. The Wayne that is immortal is an idea-
the idea that you treat people well, that you work hard at what you are passionate about, that you never fuck anybody over just to get ahead. The idea that you stand for what you believe in, even if it hurts. Wayne’s body might be gone, and in time, our memories of him will fade too- but the idea, the idea can never be erased.

Now think about it- we actually do have a shot at immortality, and self-preservation
if at the very least, in our own communities. If you imagine small-minded people to be in a box, and some of us to be out of the box, it doesn’t make alot of sense for us to be satisfied just floating around outside the box. It doesn’t actually serve any purpose. Some of us going “look at me, look at me, i’m out of the box, and so much better than you losers in the box!”. Some of us floating around thinking “meh, being outside the box doesn’t seem to serve any useful purpose. most people are deluded and i don’t have much purpose. Floating around makes me feel ungrounded, with no direction or reason. This sucks.”

That’s where the emo goth teenager meets the bummed out philosopher who climbs up the tower of babel and realises that there is no God. Sometimes it feels like “enlightenment” or “intellectual awareness” or whatever you call it is simply a cruel joke- it’s like finding out you have an incurable disease. Sometimes it seems like you’d much rather die happy and ignorant.

But it doesn’t seem right, does it? We know that there is no predestined notion of what is “right” and “wrong” and that it’s all defined by ourselves, but from a scientific and logical perspective it does not make sense that what sets us apart and puts us ahead would NOT empower us.

Imagine that we’re all in a well, and some of us climb out of the well to see a barren land and think, fuck, why did I come out of the well in the first place?
And yet once you see the light, literally, you can’t just blind yourself and pretend you never saw it.

While we all think we’re so smart and big-picture-y, we miss out on the EVEN bigger picture which is that our roles as individuals are inherently limited! We are part of societies, communities. We are like individual cells of a greater living organism.
Every day, our skin flakes and falls off. Yet if you think about it, we still have a “greater” skin that covers our entire body and has a condition, regardless of each individual skin cell. You can have nice glowing skin or dry flaky skin. Each individual skin cell doesn’t really give a damn, and were it capable of thought it would probably think that its life seemed really pointless. (This analogy is flawed and limited, but it sort of helps with regards to big picture BIGGER picture).

Going back to the well, or the box: The idea of getting out of the box, or out of the well is to lead other people out as well. We need a direction to work towards. If say 80% of the people in the box or in the well are firm and happy with being in there
we can’t do much about it, but there are 20% more who are also enlightened, or confused-but-on-the-way- people who essentially realise that there is more to existence than meets the eye, but it isn’t religion or something silly or arty farty.

In essence, our reason, or purpose is fundamentally to persevere.

To be gracious human beings, respectful, critical thinking, moral. To inspire them to do the same. We will never see the final fruits of our labour but we can tell when we are making progress. Every day, we make decisions. When we lose track of the bigger, bigger picture, we make decisions based on minor personal needs. Someone once said it’s a choice of being on the angels or on the beasts. I genuinely believe that there is a purpose, a reason, and that it is inside us all along- a reason to live life to the fullest in every sense through the means that we define ourselves.

We always think that we should do that because we’re told to do so. But see the dilemma is: if you’re being good because you don’t know what it means to be bad, are you really being good? If you do something just because you’re told to do it, does it still count?

Um. I lost my train of thought there. I’ll revisit this when I have the time. Maybe tonight. It’s way too long and repetitive and has no conclusion o_o