Where the World Ends and You Begin

If there is a purpose to human life, then we certainly haven't a clue what it is. Maybe thats for the better, if all people knew everything, life would be boring, trite, depressing and pointless. What questions would remain to be answered? This is a similar feeling to playing a strategy or puzzle game where you keep conquering levels until you reach the end. Now that you are at the end, you have a moment of triumph and bliss. But soon after that passes, you realize, there is nothing left. You are alone. Some would at this point settle to play the game over and over again, perfecting their score. But no matter what, that replay of the game just isn't as satisfying as the original feeling, the first time you went through each level. Does that mean we should quit while we are ahead? Revel at our achievements and move on? Does it mean we should go level at a time, spacing out our playing time, stretching out the game's enjoyment.

By that rational, live life in pieces, each step of the way you ask some questions, you answer some of them. Then you are content and you stop asking questions. Then at the next break point, you start posing them again. This way you go through life playing level after level, never quite reaching the end. Never quite reaching that down point or slope downward in the curve. The game stays fresh, the levels are always new.

Solo, center of the universe, wrong way to think. The only purposeful way to see: a "creator" or a "judge" or simply a way to measure points in life. Units of success, units of failure, etc.

The only purposeful way to see these things, is to see yourself as part of a whole. You are part of a bigger plan, a piece of the code that accomplishes X. You die, he dies, she dies, it dies, to balance something else. That something else is positive and feeds the whole, makes the whole happy, gives it a sugar rush like a Snickers bar.

How do you get closer to this point of seeing yourself in the whole? In this capitalist society, full of notions, objects and other material, how can you truly see yourself as part? You can see yourself, the truth is you don't ever feel like you are contributing to it in a positive way. Some succumb to their fear and take on a penance of some sort (social work, men of the church, ascetic vagabonds). Others use the easier methods of leaving such thoughts behind via rationalizations, pleasures, vices. Some of the pleasures or vices seem altruistic, others are more obviously self servient. I submit that perhaps the only way to truly do this is in complete solitude, consistently working to understand one's place in our ecosystem, the natural ecology as opposed to the social one.

Some would say this is extreme. Some would say they have accomplished the same, growing humanity healthily while staying apart of society, rather than "quashing all needs for the social." These people are somewhat correct. Not everyone can or should try to reach this level of connection. Again, there needs to be that balance, some do and some don't, but overall a neutral charge. In other words (going back to the original thought), if everyone knew everything, the world would seem meaningless (a paradox, we would have thought it would be ever meaningful). How different is this from a Puritanic village? Everyone believes the same (we've seen the story) and out of this come those who are tired of the banality of their thoughts. They break from the norm and order turns to chaos (though we translate these situations in fiction as order turning into beauty or art or love, etc.). Wouldn't we do the same? Wouldn't someone or revolution just bring us back to the state we are in now? I submit it would. Therefore, we'll never find the answers to what we seek. And if we do, we'll burn the playbook the first chance we get.