Human Life Is So Much Harder Than It Needs To Be
We make it so hard for ourselves, this human experience.
Like it would be hard enough just being born into mortal bodies that have to experience pain and get sick and deteriorate and die. That alone would be more than enough to deal with. Then on top of all that we go and create these psychological ego structures in our heads that make us miserable for a whole bunch of other reasons that aren’t even real.
I mean, we’re thrown into this world and we have no idea what’s going on, surrounded by chaotic and unpredictable giants who are full of neuroses and delusions handed down to them by previous generations, we’re very quickly taught how to make ourselves miserable using belief systems and shame and self-hatred and enmity, we stumble around for a few years, maybe plop out a baby or two and teach them how to be as crazy as we are, and then we fall down and they throw us in a hole. And then it’s over.
It’s so weird, man.
We could just be taking care of one another and holding each other’s hands as we hurtle toward the grave. When someone is born into this strange and mysterious world, we could just tell the new arrival “Welcome, we only get to be here for a little while, but we love you and we’re here for you as we experience our short time on this planet together.” And then we could hug and kiss and cry and cuddle as we spin through a universe not even our best scientists understand, until night comes.
We could do that, but we don’t. We barely pay attention to death. We barely pay attention to the fact that everything’s mysterious and life’s big questions have gone completely unanswered and science can’t explain 0.0001% of what’s actually going on.
Instead, we make up stories in our heads that cause us distress and discontentment. Stories that we are inadequate or unlovable. Stories about how other groups of people are bad. Stories about how the people around us aren’t doing the right thing. Stories about how we’ll be able to feel okay with ourselves if we can just rack up one more career accomplishment and achieve one more life goal. Stories about how people get tortured for eternity when they die if they don’t believe the right thoughts in their heads. All kinds of stories. Nonstop mental chatter that we believe with all our might.
And none of it’s real. We stress ourselves out so bad entertaining these nonstop mental monologues in our skulls, and we made up the whole show. All of it. All the defects and unworthiness. All the enemies and conflicts. All the doing it wrong and getting it wrong. It’s all made up.
Most people live in this imaginary world of believed mental constructs that offer up all sorts of reasons to feel anxious and afraid and hostile and ashamed. And then clever manipulators use those feelings to get us consenting to wars and injustices and all the self-destructive human behavior we see before us today. And that’s why everything’s as messed up as it is.
The world as it actually exists could not be more different from the world our thoughts describe. Life experienced lucidly is as different from life filtered through thought as any two things could possibly be.
The human organism can function perfectly fine without nonstop mental chatter. Thought can be nothing more than a useful tool that gets picked up when it’s needed and set down when it’s not, with attention resting in the profound wondrousness of the senses instead of mental babbling about made-up nonsense throughout the day.
It can take some work to undo all the interior dysfunction and come to this level of clarity, but it’s not nearly as much work as we’re already exerting in continuously turning the wheels of our insanity and keeping all these fictional worlds happening inside our heads. Bringing clarity to our inner processes and awakening to reality is actually the easy path. It’s just so much more peaceful and enjoyable.
And then we can just be with reality. We can just be on this ride as it actually exists. All the beauty. All the love. All the pain. All the death. We can be with it all. The whole thing. Until the end.
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The hardest thing in life--The conquest not of time and space
But of ourselves, of our stupidity, and inertia, of our greediness, blindness, self-centeredness, and touchiness
And the difference between stumbling blocks and stepping stones
Is the way in which a person uses them
—Apples of Gold
“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-God damn it, you've got to be kind.”
Kurt Vonnegut