I recently discovered a lovely park that, as I walk further, turns into a small forest near my house. I started to walk quite a lot there. The best part of the walk is always when I'm alone for at least a few minutes. This simple moment of being in nature, with no person around, is magical. There is no confusion about anything - everything just flows as it is. It's simple, beautiful and refreshing.
But then, coming back from the walk, everything starts to feel awkward with each step, especially since I'm walking near shopping centers with various services. There are all these unspoken rules of interactions, symbols with meanings, and systems to manage everything from human traffic to trading goods.
Therefore, every time I return from the long walk, the question arises: "Why are we doing all this?" And it's quite an unusual question when you really think about it. Just as when you are in the forest, you only see the trees and not the whole forest, you simply cannot notice anything strange about social life when you are involved in it.
In this way, it's pretty common for people not to see any difference between life and social life. They think of life as a social life. In other words, they see life only as a psychological construct of thoughts and emotions, with the ego projecting human uniqueness at the center of existence.
Uh, let's get back to the forest.
Think about who you are when you are alone in the forest, when there are no other people to confirm your existence as an ego or projected persona. Who are you, then? Well, if you're unlucky and meet a pack of hungry wolves, you're just a piece of meat - a meal for them. And it doesn't matter if you're a great CEO of a prominent company. You cannot bribe a pack of wolves with social status or money. They don't care. You're just a meal.
In this way, we can discover two things: we can be a meal, so we have a physical body, and we have developed a great imagination about who we are that is indeed unique to humans.
However, if we forget that imagination is just an imagination and take it seriously, it can be incredibly dangerous, especially as the most intelligent species on this planet. We can, for example, convince ourselves that we are special and then develop systems that will cherish our uniqueness. Finally, we could forcefully impose these systems on the entire world. Ugh, that would be terrible, wouldn't it?
And here we are in our serious social life, the center of our attention, playing our parts like actors on the stage. After all, isn't the word person coming from the Latin word persona, which originally mean a mask or a false face? It's like Shakespeare beautifully wrote in one of his works:
"All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,"
The problem and beauty is that we're not ordinary actors. No, we're phenomenal actors who don't even know where they came from or where they're going. Acors who are so great, so involved in their roles, that they don't even know who they are without their role. This is the pinnacle of acting.
And that's wonderful - what a spectacle we put on. Without us, life would be pretty boring. I mean, peaceful and balanced, but pretty boring. I'm trying to write that we might be silly, but you can't deny we're creative. I would say that this social construct is endlessly stupid, but it's almost as creative as it's stupid. Not bad.
The only real problem is that people do not seem to see a difference between a phenomenon, that is, life or existence itself, and their imagination. And hardly anyone is interested in looking for anything beyond our little show. This could lead to a disaster. See, we can play this spectacle, a human game, or whatever we like to call it, but it will be a disaster whenever imagination becomes more important than life itself.
If you really think about it, we're creative, but we're a disaster for this planet. Every little creature contributes to the overall well-being of this planet in some way - pollinates flowers, fertilizes the soil, or works in the soil. Only human don't do it, but believe in their uniqueness and destroy the world for their silly play. It's foolish.
For example, cover your nose for 30 seconds to stop breathing. What did you think about when you were completely losing oxygen? Did you ask about God to save you? Or maybe about economic growth? No, you asked about air, because that's what is essential for your life.
See, what's really important for our well-being is the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat. Then, there is our general physical condition. Only then do we have this psychological construct - a drama of life. And the drama can be fun, but only when we don't forget about what's really important.
Humans are storytelling creatures who need meaning for their existence because of their complexity - the number of mental stimuli, such as thinking and feeling, that they experience. Other animals don't have such problems and just exist doing their thing. But people simply can't stand themselves, as Blaise Pascal once wrote:
"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
Therefore, the question is whether we really need to do all the things we do. Or do we do the things that we do because we simply can't sit quietly in a room alone - because we can't handle our intellect and need distractions?
People seem to be like children addicted to video games, sitting in a dark room - they are addicted to playing their role in society and pursuing their dreams or desires. In this way or another, they run away from the questions about their nature. In fact, they created all this spectacle to hide behind some identity, distract themselves, and not face these questions ever again.
One of the greatest Chinese philosophers, Zhuangzi, wrote long ago:
"The effect of life in society is to complicate and confuse our existence, making us forget who we really are by causing us to become obsessed with what we are not."
Therefore, if what we are not becomes more important than who we are and the actual reality of life, it will be a complete disaster. And we are heading in this direction, obsessed, completely absorbed in the spectacle we have arranged and ignoring the phenomenon of life. I think we could use more lonely walks in the forest.
