Perhaps life is just an unrelenting stumble until you eventually find something that gives your life purpose. Maybe the stumbling is all we can do, and maybe that’s as good as it gets. We try hard to rewire our brains, and overcome our emotions in hopes to obtain this imaginative sense of control, but the truth is, we have no control. Yes, we can change aspects of our life to make us “more happy”, and if something doesn’t work out we can change it to hopefully lead us to a better outcome. But what happens when you change the thing that you are unhappy with and the thing you’ve changed it to is equally as terrible? Hence the unrelenting stumble.
Or, perhaps we as a society are just never satisfied. We constantly look for more and more. Most Americans are so consumed with the “American Dream” that if they do not have a house, the car of their dreams, and a family by the time they are 30 years old, they would probably have a complete mental breakdown. There are, however, people who are not motivated by such trivialities as the “American Dream”. Although, even with these goals aside, people are still searching for that “perfect life”, this ever-long “quest for happiness”, whatever it may be in their opinion. Maybe that is our problem. The constant feeling that what you have is not enough. If things weren’t bad already, we now have people envious over their 800+ Facebook friends that make the on-viewer realize just how much they “do not have”. “Hey, look at me and all the places I’ve traveled to!”, “Hey, look at me and my new promotion”, “Hey, look at me and my happy family and child!”. After all, nothing makes you feel quite like a failure like Facebook does.
But rest assured, social media is full of lies. Nobody wants to be honest on social media, because exposing your vulnerabilities to your 780 acquaintances on Facebook doesn’t seem so fun. So we pretend. We upload happy pictures, and positive statuses to make the on-viewer perceive you as someone who, “really has their shit together”. Thus creating this constant envy that social media has created that makes us incapable of obtaining the satisfaction that we want to achieve.
So yes, maybe life is an unrelenting stumble. But maybe the way to make everything more tolerable is to let go of control. Instead of desperately trying to achieve our own perception of happiness, we should just be still and live entirely in the moment. As stated by Alan Watts in his book, The Wisdom of Insecurity, “life requires no future to complete itself nor explanation to justify itself. In this moment it is finished.”
To quote the final song from the musical Avenue Q:
Princeton: Why does everything have to be so hard?
Gary Coleman: Maybe you’ll never find your purpose
Christmas Eve: Lots of people don’t
Princeton: But then I don’t even know why I’m alive
Kate Monster: Well, who does, really?
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