The Thinking Sapling

It’s been over two weeks since I posted. Frankly? It’s because I’ve found myself rather busy with coursework and all. While it distracted me from overthinking, such times always bring me back to the same question: what’s the point of life?

When endlessly grinding things just to see a few numbers go up, I can’t help but desire reassurance that this all serves some purpose, and perhaps it does. At the very least, it serves my goal of graduation, which in turn serves the goal of living a better life, and so on.

We can go down the rabbit hole of naming my hierarchy of values, but something else had drawn my attention — the fact that we value anything at all.

It’s what differentiates the living from the inanimate; the conscious being from the rock. Unlike the rock, the living beings of this world prefer the world to be one state over another. We prefer a painless world to one filled with torture, a happy world over one filled with sorrow. Our interactions with the world show a duality where we value the world by what it is not.

We learn to spurn the “undesirable” end of these dualities. We strive towards a state of being that aligns with our values, and we pity a state that opposes it. Those who seek wealth pity the poor; those who seek beauty pity the ugly; and those who seek life pity the dead.

These dualities are both the cause of joy and suffering. Joy because we delight in something we are not; suffering because we long for something else we are not. The more we value something, the more pain we will feel when we lose it.

I suppose this is where I have to be a bit honest. Those who know Eastern philosophy probably see Buddhist and Taoist influence all over the place. Some minds have probably already found the eight-fold path or living according to the Way as a solution. And to be clear, these thoughts have influenced me.

Yet, I won’t claim to know the answer here. I mean, in my very first blog, I had told the internet I’m somewhat agnostic; c’est la vie.

In all seriousness, on whether this attachment is completely undesirable or the duality should be collapsed, I have no answer. It’d be strange if I, barely out of my teenage years, knew the secret to the cosmos. I’m just here describing what I see — life.