"That's life. You're living now. And one day... You'll be dying..." -- Cassiel
Anyone who grew up around me during high school would have recognized this quote. This is a memorable quote taken from a movie called "City of Angels" (1998). We used to say this to each other all the time in order to overcome the pressure exerted upon us by the college entrance examinations.
I know I have not posted anything here for a couple of years now but it does not mean that nothing has happened since then. On the contrary, I got to travel through almost 20 countries and meet hundreds of people who contributed to defining my life and my career. I will try to write further about them on later posts.
The reason I decided to pick it up again was because a friend of mine from college, a housemate to be more precise, just committed suicide. I am not going into details here because this blog might go public at some point in the future, but apparently he had been planning this since he was still living in the house. According to a relative of his, at one point he found himself a job as a winter watchman at an isolated lodge where he ended up taking his own life. Some people even chatted with him through an IM system while he was there, and apparently he was completely normal even right before he passed away.
I know it was his own decision, but it is never easy for the people who were left behind. I just wonder what went through his mind while he planned everything and when he put his plan into action. I recall when I first tried to convince him to move into the house. I was the president of the house and he was a very shy 16-year-old who claimed he had no friends because he had spent his entire life homeschooling. He was this unparalleled child prodigy, who entered Cornell's highly competitive PhD program at the age of 19. After living with him for two years, he had matured unrecognizably and I thought he had overcome his suicidal tendencies. Little did we know that deep inside there were still some unresolved issues swirling in his mind.
It was undoubtedly a tragedy, but the pain should stay with me and with the people whose lives he touched. Today, I am writing to express some of my feelings with regards to life in general and to put on the table some rhetorical questions that are considered to be taboos in the modern society.
I am assuming here that anyone who has lived in a sizable city has heard of or met someone who has been depressed to the point that he or she was thinking of committing suicide. I have even gotten close to crossing that line myself several times during my lifetime. I believe this has to do with the fact that we are all living in a peaceful world with no real value to defend or land to conquer. We do not need to fight for our food; we can just work and buy what we need for anything has a price. We live our lives for the satisfaction of our daily cravings, and our retirement plans.
I have been losing some sleep thinking about life in general...
As George Berkeley once said, "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?". The theory of immaterialism states that you cease to exist once everyone loses track of you and there is nobody around to perceive you. If a person is born on an isolated island and never meets anyone until the day he or she dies, what was the point of his/her life? If you were a jellyfish, without a brain or eyes, relying on nerve cells to move and react to food or danger, all you would be doing is finding something to eat every day until the day you decease.
If we think about it, everyone... everything is part of a bigger and overarching "system". Say, to the extent of our knowledge, the smallest particle is the Quark, which in turn can be part of a Proton, Electron or Neutron. All three combined will form an Atom. Multiple Atoms form a Molecule -> Organelle -> Cell -> Tissue -> Organ -> Organ Sys -> Organism and this is exactly where we are. I don’t know if a proton knows that it belongs to, say, the brain of a person but everything that its “instincts” tells it to do combined with all the other protons around it will be later translated into the person’s action. (I wanted to use physical layers of network protocols as an example but that would prevent some people from following my line of thought :P.) Needless to say, the thoughts of many people can move a society from one stage of evolution to another.
Let's say we push this theory a little further. We are an organism and we belong to a community. The Community is part of a Society -> Country -> Race -> Species -> Genus -> Family -> Order -> Class -> Phylum -> Kingdom -> Biosphere (did I get this right?). Then there is the Planet -> Planetary System -> Galaxy -> Universe. And this is as far as our knowledge goes. So in a sense, we are part of a bigger system the same way a stomach is part of a digestive system.
It is easy to make connections towards a smaller scale, but it is very difficult to see where in the chain you belong. We might think that we are making our own decisions, but in a sense, we are just like a cell in a tissue and our actions translate into small movements of the encompassing system. Our wars are just like cancer on a skin. Going back to the theory of “immaterialism”, the bottom line is that a person that is not perceived by the society does not contribute to the chain. This person will eventually be purged from the system as if he or she never existed.
I once read a book by Jostein Gaarder, I think it was called "Through a Glass". He mentions that there are always limitations to knowledge and one can never understand its creator. Say, technology evolves and we build super-advanced androids. We would never be able to create an android that surpassed our own intellect since we were the ones who created them. By induction, the same thing applies the other way around. If you believe that the universe and everything below it down to the Quark were creations of God, we will never have the capability to genuinely understand him.
I don’t want this to become too religious, so I will stop here. I promise my next post will be easier to read :P
Post Scripton: A couple of days ago I found out that a good friend of mine was reading this post and it made me feel bad about the things that I wrote. I apologize for the people who are religious and have a very clear vision towards life. I am not a discredited person. I am... I am just confused for having grown up in a religiously-multifaceted environment.
