On Living for the Things That Will Outlast You
Growing up is hard. Growing up in a century that appears to be constantly at war with itself is harder.
There is always something happening somewhere.
A war, a displacement, a collapse, a headline descriibing something so catastophic that, by all reasonable standards, it should alter the emotional climate of an entire day.
A yet the strange thing is not that these stories exist, but the way that we receive them. A notification appears- a sentence describing devastation.
A number attached to it. Perhaps an image. Then the day continues.
The unsettling part is not the tragedy itself, but the absurdity of the situation: that a person can read about the desctruction of someone else's life while standing in line for coffee, and feel- simultaneously- that it is both enourmously tragic and somehow not their place to react at all.
This is where the confusion begins.
Because there is something deeply troubling and fundamentally wrong that the idea that a headline about suffering should feel distant or abstract. But there is also something deeply unrealistic about expecting ordinary people to process the suffering of an entire planet before noon.
So the result is a kind of emotional stalemate.
People feel sympathy. They say so publicly. They express outrage when necessary. But increasingly there is an understanding beneath it all that none of it actually alters- or has any impact whatsoever on that note- the machinery producing the events in the first place.
And that raises a question that is rarely asked out loud.
How discouraged must a generation become before it stops believing that its outrage has any practical consequence?
Or perhaps that is the wrong question. The more unsettling one might be this: how many times can a generation march in the streets, raise its voice, sign petitions, argue with strangers, and believe- sincerely and repeatedly- that collective outrage is capable of bending the direction of the world, before it begins to suspect that the machinery it is shouting at was never designed to listen in the first place?
At what point does protest stop feeling like participation in democracy and start feeling, however unfairly, like appealing a verdict that was never meant to be overturned?
It is not a thought people enjoy entertaining, but it lingers all the same.
The uncomfortable reality is that the likeness of you and I will never determine, on the grand scale of things, what the world becomes.
Or rather, for optimism's sake, it's rather unlikely.
And once this is understood, the realisation that follows is as such:
Something has always been happening somewhere, and something will always be happening somewhere.
Life continues. It's the way things are. Someone has always set the dinner table in one hemisphere while someone else loses a home in another.
It feels absurd to continue with ordinary rituals in the presence of so much suffering. But it would be equally absurd not to.
The longer one thinks about it, the clearer it becomes that this contradiction is not, by any means, new. It has always existed. Beauty, mundanity, and devastation have always occurred at the same time.
In Buddhism, this reality is described by the concept of Dukkha.
The word is often translated simply as suffering, though that translation is slightly misleading. Dukkha refers to the broader condition of existence itself: the understanding that dissatisfaction, instability, and loss are not anomalies in life but structural features of it.
This is not a pessimistic philosophy so much as an honest one.
It begins by acknowledging something modern life often struggles to admit- that the world is not designed to be consistently fair, peaceful, or comprehensible. Life's a fact.
Once that is accepted, the question changes.
The question is no longer how to eliminate suffering entirely. The question becomes how to live "meaningfully" in a world where it cannot be eliminated.
And this is where scale becomes important again.
An individual life cannot repair the grand structure of the world. But it can determine the character of the small portion of reality it actually inhabits.
I will still wake up in the morning and have my cat to feed. There will be conversations to be had, friends to call, meals to cook, books to finish, and slow evenings that pass without incident.
There are still the small continuities that hold a life together, the rituals of ordinary existence that seem insignificant when measured against global catastrophe, yet remain the only parts of the world any person can truly participate in.
The strange truth is that even in the middle of a century that often appears to be coming apart at the seams, most people will still wake up tomorrow and make coffee, answer messages, water plants, complain about traffic, and laugh at something unexpectedly stupid.
And perhaps that is not trivial at all.
Because the sweetness of life has never existed separately from its chaos.
It has always been hidden inside the ordinary days, the quiet afternoons, the moments where nothing remarkable happens and yet the simple act of being alive continues all the same.
This, in many ways, is the lesson buried inside what Buddhism describes as Dukkha- the understanding that existence was never designed to deliver only peace, only joy, only stability.
The good and the terrible were always going to arrive together, whether anyone finds that arrangement comfortable or not.
And so a person is left with a choice that is both simple and strangely difficult.
Bitterness is easy. Cruelty is easy. Despair, in many ways, is the most predictable response to living in a time that appears to be constantly proving its capacity for destruction.
But there is something defiant about refusing to let the condition of the world determine the condition of your character. About continuing to care for people, to show kindness, to build friendships, to maintain the fragile and ordinary things that make a life feel worth living even when the larger world seems determined to remind you how fragile it all is.
The world may remain chaotic for a long time. But you can refuse to become cruel in response to it.
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