Till about a month ago, I believed that "hope of better future" is the most important force that keeps the human life going. But then I came across a bitter truth. A truth that made my basis of "perception about life" shatter down like WTC. It challenged all of my assumptions about living the life. And now I am re-engineering everything. That bitter truth is
The life is an incremental anticlimax
Now, lets first define the key terms.
Incremental: A process that makes an entity to keep on increasing after short intervals of time. Assume an empty set of entities. We keep adding entities to this set one-by-one and this process of populating the set is said to be "incremental".
Anticlimax: A sequence of events that occur in decreasing order of importance or effectiveness or speed etc. (this is how the word anticlimax is defined as a figure of speech). Although there can be different meanings of the same word, I will stick to the meaning that I have mentioned here. So, when I say anticlimax, I mean decrease in the level of excitement.
To get over: To assimilate the fact that a particular entity does not (and will not) cause you harm any more. This assumes that your emotions were depending on that entity earlier but now, that entity cannot affect you.
Now let's start the discussion on the original claim.
We will take a simple example of "candy". Till you are twelve (or so) years of age, candy is one of the most important thing in your life. You feel that if you get enough candy, you won't need anything else to be happy in your life. Once you grow up, you get over candy and start feeling that other things are really more important like friends, career etc. And you get over candy. Similarly, after few more years, friends and career start loosing their charm and some other things gain more importance.
So, we can say that up to a particular age, some particular thing (entity) holds the most importance in one's life and after that age, that importance seizes to exists. And this happens for almost all the important entities in one's life. So, in a way, one gets over these entities some day or other.
Now let's consider a set of entities that one has already got over at a given time instance. At the time of the birth this is an empty set. As one grows up, the process of getting over different entities starts and incrementally the set starts getting filled up.
Once a person gets over a particular entity, the excitement about that entity goes away. So, as a person starts getting over more and more entities, the overall excitement level starts reducing. Note that here the overall excitement starts decreasing with the age.
According to me this is a most typical example of anticlimax that happens in almost everyone's life but most of the people are unaware of it. So, their life goes on relying on the belief that their future will be better than their present. But according to me this belief is not true.
So now what ?
Does this mean that the people should not expect better future? Does this mean that if there is no better future and future is going to be worse, then one should not think positively about living?
Well,
I am not quite done with thinking on this. But there will be answers. The most promising one I can see (as of now) is the process itself. One of my good friends once said,"love the process, not the goal". So, one can go through the process of getting over different things through one's lifetime and according to me, that's life and one should not give up on everything immediately. One can still expect happiness in the process of getting over different things in one's life.
Anyways, this answer might not be the best (even might not hold true at all). But there will exist some answer to the above question (because I believe). And I guarantee to post it here when I find it.
-AmitHK
