Observable life is simple. Complex in its design, but simple nonetheless. Trees don’t have any moral dilemmas — they live long, blossom, and die. It is yet to be discovered how plants perceive life and death, but I am pretty sure that fear, anxiety, guilt, and regret have no place in the wonderful world of flora on planet Earth (or flat Earth, dear reader, whatever your beliefs and convictions are).
Do you think wolves spend their days pondering about the meaning of true love? They mate and then raise the young, it comes naturally. Some may say wolves are primitive animals, but let’s make a mental note about loyalty. It is most common for a wolf to stay with one partner, and if that partner dies, the wolf may never get into a “relationship” again. How simple is love in the wolves’ world? Would you say it’s just instincts and hormones?
Sunsets and sunrises don’t get depressed. Thunderstorms aren’t psychopaths. Beavers don’t get high on drugs and lose their ability to build dams. Deer are doing just fine without cognitive therapy. Foxes and leopards are unlikely to have guilt trips about what they have done to their parents, children, friends. Ducks have no OCD, and fish never complain of noisy neighbors, small salaries, unfulfilled desires, or lousy octopuses living next door. Do grasshoppers ever get stressed?
We, the people, have somehow managed to grow into the most screwed up species on this planet. Along with making amazing discoveries and reaching incredible depths in many areas of life (the depths which truly exist only in our minds though... but then doesn’t everything?) we also succeeded in becoming the most stressed, confused, dark, corrupted, fearful, and generally fucked up creatures produced by this world (or God, or aliens, or bevolution, or whatever else you think is “out there”).
It’s OUR life, not NATURAL LIFE, that’s complicated, painful, challenging, and generally perververted. And don’t we always have to find the guilty one — something or someone that has made things this way?
We will point fingers at the devil or at repriloids, blame it all on a vague concept like “human nature”, or maybe hint at social conditioning (who started it?) and the genes. The list is endless if you really want to get into it — every culture has its own “bad guy” to blame.
I could call out one no less vague entity called “The System,” but in any case, it all comes down to one thing that differs us from other animals and the rest of the living things on earth.
Our CNS, and the cherry on top — our brain. A wonderful, mysterious organ that looks quite disgusting when taken out of the skull. Something that resembles the insides of a walnut, but not quite as beautiful, unless your way of perceiving things is different from mine. It also reminds me of labyrinths, and labyrinths, however mystifying they are, don’t seem to be something one should want to end up in. Labyrinths are places where we get tricked and lost forever, where unspeakable monsters lurk in dark corridors, and where we must go through pain to look for an exit or to acquire something valuable hidden in the depths.
The brain and the CNS, our super-complex organs of perception and interpretation, basic body functioning, reactions, and emotions make this simple life super-complicated and at times — unbearable. It looks like we, humans, are just a bunch of little kids running around playing with supercomputers and grenades... and is it surprising at all that we suffer and get hurt? It almost looks like we aren’t ready for these super-advanced tools that come as a part of a package (our physical body). We are just kind of thrown in, “Figure it out, kid, grow up fast or die.”
And the System grows us, but in the wrong way. We enter our adulthood like half-robots controlled by hundreds of semi-automatic, predetermined mental and emotional reactions to various stimuli. The System is complicated, the reactions are numerous, the texts are endless repetitions of the same pre-written scenarios, and anyone, literally anyone can fill in. It’s the text that counts, it’s the dialogue that remains — characters rotate and rotate, counting hundreds of thousands.
When stuck in something on endless repeat, isn’t it only natural to want to break out?
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