Hello, steemians, and welcome to my page, eh!
I woke up this morning in a depressed frame of mind, not all that unusual for this time of year. My mind was filled with thoughts like, why am I getting up? (other than my bladder) What point is there in even being awake? Why am I here? What is the point of being here? What is the point of life? What's the point of being conscious? Why am I here? Is there any point to life? Does life have any meaning? Are we just some random biological happening? Is this all there is? Do I have a purpose? Does life have a purpose? Is there any meaning to life in this 3 D reality? What does it all mean?
Kind of a rough start to the day...
Is it better to have goals for the day, or is it easier to just drift downstream with all the other dead leaves?
Why is boredom so hard for me to deal with? Why can't I just be happy with sitting on the couch and staring out the window at random things that pass by?
Why do I need to have something to do to distract me from my inner thoughts?
Are my inner thoughts so depressing that I need to distract myself from them?
Why do I think so much? Why do I have so much traffic in my mind all the time?
Why is it so hard to focus on any one thing for any length of time?
I was talking to my house mate about this stuff and we were talking about the strangeness of trying to find meaning in life. She's pretty comfortable with her life and doesn't get too introspective about it like I do. She's not easily bored like I am, and she's comfortable with not being busy like I seem to have to be. We all have our own individual way of relating to life, I guess.
Another thing that occoured to me in this whole "why am I here" thing was what makes me me? Why am I who I am and what I am. From the point of biology, I'm here because my parents had sex during a time that she had a ripe egg waiting to be fertilized. Would I be the same person if a different sperm had penetrated the outer membrane of the egg? Was it just a matter of luck or chance that I am me? Probably. Biology is too complex to contemplate the possibilities without melting down the brain...
Am I sentient for a reason, or is that just a strange trick of the brain chemistry and neuron functioning? This is a deep rabbithole to crawl down into, and the cheshire cat is just waiting to mess with your head.
"One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small, and the ones that mother gives you don't do anything at all..."
Why we are sentient is a question with a lot of different answers, and none of them are likely to be right. Humans are simply not equipped to be able to understand the true nature of what is beyond simple consiousness. There are so many theories and esoteric explanations for why we exist and why we are able to think random abstract thoughts. I can't say that I believe any of the crap that people spout to support their theory of why we exist. All they have is their faith to try to prove their point.
It seems that a lot of us spend most of our life looking for reasons to justify our existence, for our "purpose" in life from all around us, from outside of us. Most of us come up empty handed in that search. Religion tends to be the thing that fills that hole in our existence from the outside. It gives us something to think about from outside of our inner mind, and acts as a bandaid to our inner emptiness. The problem is that it doesn't work for everyone. It would be nice to be able to just give up on our inner mind and just fill the empty spot with religious dogma of some kind, but that doesn't answer the deep questions of existence, it just fills the hole with mud. You have to have faith to believe the dogma, in some cases, complete blind faith. Faith is believing something without any proof to support those beliefs.
When something happens that cracks that faith, or worse yet, destroys that faith, the hole that's left in the inner self is twice as deep and twice as empty.
Finding something from inside of you to start filling that hole in your inner self is a lot of work, a lot of inner searching for your personal truth. Some people never find it. For some people, it's a moving target, every time you think you finally know why you're here, what your purpose is, something throws a wrench in your gears and you have to start looking again. Some people find their purpose in life, the thing that gives them inner peace and a measure of happiness, and it stays with them for the rest of their life. Those are the lucky ones.
I'm 63 years old and I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up.
For me, it seems to be a moving target. This has been affected by my lifelong difficulty with coming to terms with who I perceive myself to be, but am not. It's only in the last 10 years that I've been working on being ok with me instead of trying to hide it, even from myself. I've never been able to wish it away.
The inner parts of me don't mesh well together, so that makes everything else harder to deal with. There is a certain amount of this inner crap that I'm going to have to deal with for the rest of my life, because there is no solution to the problem in this life. I can't fix it, I can only come to terms with it being what it is. Every time I think I'm finally comfortable with it, something happens that makes me have to deal with all the feelings and emotions that surround it all over again. It's like someone took the box of crayons and dumped them on the floor, and I have to pick them up and put them back in the box again, neatly. It's tiring, and it adds fuel to my clinical depression.
And now winter is coming, and I have seasonal affected disorder, formerly known as cabin fever. I have various strategies for fighting back the depression, but some days are better than others. Today was not one of those days.
Thank you for stopping by my page to read this post.
An even bigger thank you if you made it all the way through this post!
