The human condition - getting out of the labyrinth

We constantly search or strive towards something. We cannot help but set goals.

Maybe its our human condition to strive to be the best. As cavemen we had to strive to be the best hunter to compete with others to survive. If we survived ... well ... we won. So maybe today our species is at a loss as to how to feed that desire to be the best. No longer is surviving a great enough win for many of us in the western world. But our brains have not changed. It feeds us with the same intensity to chase our own goals as our ancestors did at surviving. Suddenly buying a house or progressing in a career has the same intensity as surviving. The brain cannot adapt to something it has not experienced although its pre-set features still work. One persons stress can be anothers mild inconvenience. Its all perspective.

So maybe we find our own measures of success to feed our animalistic brains. We cannot understand the world without goals. We cannot relate to others without an understanding of our being through our goals. We cannot compute situations we face without a sense of where we stand. Am I more successful at that than him? Does she know that I studied this is depth? I could help them with how they are feeling because I have felt the same. Or I must ask this person for help as I am 'failing' at this. Without focus we feel lost. I think that's what our 20's are about. Drifting.

Suddenly we no longer have easy aims ... that next test, that next essay, that next grading on our abilities. For once we are thrown into the world with no way of gauging our success. Can you judge someones' wage as their success? their relationship? their knowledge? their happiness? Suddenly the realisation that the world is not a place of comparing but rather a place of just being is rather jarring.

Many of us use our energy to search for the next adventure, that

 "Great perhaps" as John Green most eloquently wrote in his novel 'Looking for Alaska'.

I think that sums it up well. We search and run and search and run. Ticking boxes and racing to a finish line that we don't know exists. The panic of the finiteness of our lives chasing us all the way. Is it far? Will it take years? Can I sprint at it for a couple of seconds and make it? Will I trek for decades and make it? Will it take me decades to reach forward and grasp it or did it never exist in the first place?

"You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.” John Green, Looking for Alaska.

I think we all strive to be content. All the other goals are just routes to it. To feel pure happiness. I suppose Buddhists would describe it as finding enlightenment. Christianity almost has the same flavour. The thought of living in a thankful way and helping others in order to reach heaven. Maybe heaven and enlightenment are the same thing. Maybe heaven isn't a place. Maybe its a state of being. Some believe that you can reach it through practise, others, not until you die.

I'd like to think that we can train ourselves to become enlightened but I don't know whether our brains can allow it. Can our brains work without goals. Can we truly be happy without suffering. Can we truly be content at any stage without remembering our suffering? We compare. Without comparing how can an emotion exist? How can we know if we are happy or sad without experiencing the other. Are they concreate things? One persons understanding of sadness can never match another. If emotions are how we feel towards an event by comparing that moment to another then nothing is constant. Nothing is set. Even time. I suppose we like the idea of stability. That we want to control the next step and we get so hung up on planning and executing our goals that we forget that we have control over nothing.

We get stuck in a labyrinth that we create for ourselves.

The human condition

Lozzy