Life. What am I doing in life? Well, for starters, you aren’t the only one asking yourself that. Everyone else your age is torturing themselves with the same question. This happens not just when you’re a college kid. It would’ve happened to you in school, as early as in grade nine, or earlier. Raise your hands in your mind if you agree. Believe me, it’ll continue to happen. It’ll continue to happen till you’ve achieved everything in life or up until the point you’ve lost all mental cognition, most likely the latter since the former’s unattainable in this world. Why does it happen? Why do we keep replaying the same question in a loop at several points in our lives? Is this kind of like an elaborate prank planned out by the gods when they were creating us? Like “Oh, wait. Let’s plant the same question in their minds, put them in the labyrinth that is earth, and see what they do to find the answer.”
So, what are we doing here, on this tiny speck of mass in this inexplicably large cosmos? What’s the point of everything we humans do? First, let’s look at this from the point of view of a regular person. So let’s leave out the Einsteins and the Hitlers and the Newtons and the Chuck Norrises.
Let’s take the perspective of a Mechanical engineer, since I’m one and I can relate quite easily with the topic. So, I’m three years deep in this huge ocean that is engineering and it blows that it’s taken me as long as it has to realize that I’m going to be competing with millions of my own compadres. So this is kind of the time I’m thinking “Oh shoot. What am I doing? Am I going to study more? (Pfft…like I’m studying now) Am I going to work? If I’m going to work, am I going to do what I love, one which barely pays the bills or am I going to do the completely irrelevant job that’s paying more?” I look around me, at my own friends and my brain goes haywire like “Oh man, he’s doing that. Whoa! She’s doing that. Oh damn, what AM I doing? Why am I not doing any of that?” Technically, this is the point in life where I’m thinking everyone else has something more than I have to offer. Of course, it’s probably true. The fact that they’re doing something better than I can ever do, but the question is can they do what I can? Well, I’m academically let’s say well off, I can engage a couple of people in a somewhat not lame conversation, I can play a couple of games, I can be appreciably sociable, I can be the kind of guy people can trust with important life events, I can write some fancy jibber jabber and a bunch of other stuff.
Ideally, I should be happy with what I have. More than happy, actually. But this is when my most trivial human instinct kicks in, hunger. Hunger for more. But this hunger doesn’t present itself as an appetite of some sort or in any other positive way. It begins to make me put myself on the line of fire, makes me want to compare myself with the others around me, be it stranger or friend. See, that’s the kind of thing that’s borderline hazardous. But guess what, we’re humans and we tread on this line like it didn’t mean a thing. This leads me to draw this huge chart of comparison. I compare myself with everyone I’ve known, everyone I’ve met and probably everyone I might make an acquaintance with. I begin treading the path of an unfathomable insanity which is probably why I’m writing this piece. And then it begins to dawn on me. I’m a regular kid with regular issues. Nothing out of the ordinary, right? If a million others can deal with the same thing in their own ways, I can figure it out too.
I manage a quite pleasing grade sheet. I have friends. I have people I trust. I have people I fight with. I have people I love. I have people who ignore me. I have people who love me. I read books, a lot of them. I’m a writer (I’d like to think of myself as one, you judge.) I write relatively cool stuff. People read my cool stuff. Some of them even relate to it.
Ignore all the narcissism, and you can see where I’m leading you. You have all these too. I mean, not the exact same things, but other things. You may be a good musician, an amazing artist, a human calculator, a brilliant strategist, even a Dalek, who knows! That’s the beauty of life. You never know until you do.
Personally, I’d like to think of all this as an elaborate prank by the gods, because for some reason being the subject of a celestial experiment excites me. Or, I just read too many books. Either ways, I’d rather be a Katniss Everdeen thrown into an eerily calm arena, sent in to eliminate competition or a nervous little kid waiting for a train on a platform that doesn’t exist in muggles’ minds, than be one of the overworked, relentless zombies looking to make a quick buck. Do what you love, love what you do.
