Blog/article - The Living's Easy

         Or is it? Existing is easy, but living is hard. Existing is a selfish enterprize, guided foremost by self-preservation. It obeys social and intellectual conformity, because dissent is perilous and lonely. One cannot pursue truth in the constraints of their peers' likeness, when the questions that face them as individuals, demand the most moral character. If most of the group takes the easier and immoral path, it becomes dangerous for the individual to pursue truth and live, lest he risk his comfortable place in the social order. 

        It is here that one begins to understand that living is harder than existing. It brings less pleasure and more discomfort. People who exist are more likeable, they enable pleasure and never threaten the social order. People who live, they make things awkward and they have less fun. On the surface in fact, it doesn't make much sense at all to live, but to exist instead is more sensible. How could anybody argue against social cohesion and more pleasure? There appears to be nothing tangible or worthwhile that one sacrifices in rejecting life for mere existence, but I absolutely believe there is. 

        I have already stated that existence is, in other words, self-preservation. When the purpose of waking up, working and socializing is me. My life, my health, my desires and my experience. In such a worldview, every gesture towards another, however outwardly sincere, is a long-winded act of maintaining his or her social network, and therefore their own structure of dependence. Such a person cannot truly care for another's happiness or suffering, unless it advantages them socially to do so. 

        Evidence for this can be seen in groups of those who merely exist. They champion the solidarity or fraternity of their clan, but are otherwise unaffected by acts of immorality against outsiders. They are not only demonstrating that their decency is reserved for those they have beneficial relationships with, but that the very fabric of their group's cohesion is mutually advantageous selfishness. I suspect that this is the experience of 99% of school children. Civil and empathetic society however, rests on that they grow up.

        So what is living? Living is responding. Living is evading moral catastrophe in the negligent pursuit of immediate comfort and pleasure. Living is reacting to what existing accepts as circumstance. Living disrupts and offends, because it has no higher value than truth, even in the face of social rejection. But for what is all this unnecessary confrontation worth? 

        To understand that, one must begin to leave the world of Me and subscribe to something larger. Something worth losing friends for. The answer is somewhat profound, but it is for the betterment of those that one has not yet met, may never meet and those that are not yet born. For one to understand the significance of choosing to live, they must depart from transaction or want for returns, because it is not wholly anything to do with them. One who lives, champions life, which is never theirs to possess, such as existence is. Life came before them and it will go on after. To live is for life and we may never see the fruits of doing that. One cannot rationally benefit from doing such a thing, because one is not the reason.

        Exist is a word that came to us from Latin and entered the popular tongue after the scientific revolution, when the academic groundworks to dissolving ideas like god and the spirit were lain. But life is an old Germanic word that predates writing itself. We have been familiar with living for a lot longer than we have existing, but the world today would suggest the reverse.

        No sane person I know would wish to see their parent, sibling or child end up working in the world of pornography, and yet to make the case that porn is a sort of corruption that is bad for people, is bordering on blasphemy in the selfish age of me. 'I don't know them, and it is their choice, so what's the problem?'. So long as everybody is a selfish constellation of matter, unthinkingly driven by primal wants, within the borders of their own experience, there can be no moral implications in another pursuing what they wish to do, with their body, in their own existence. Their existence is theirs. Nobody else can claim ownership of it and it dies with them. But they are only a partial owner of their life. 

        Tragedies that happen to them, affect anybody who has real love for them. If what people choose to do with their lives is privately self-destructive, then it isn't only themselves that is affected. In worshipping the sacred cow of consent, we have failed to recognize that many of the terrible things that happen to people are by their own choice. We not only protect the bad decisions, but we gratify them, as triumphs of liberty, in the wake of what destruction it causes to their lives or the heartbreak it brings upon their loved ones. Inwardly obsessed and outwardly blind. liberating people from judgement aboard the ship, by casting them into the depths.

        Intellectuals and academics offer nothing that can save us. Their cyclical psychology theories and endless sociological drivel stops at nothing to describe every human act as a self-serving, biologically-driven phenomena or statistic. A certainty of a creature convicted by a will to exist, or more tragically, not to. But I believe, that something far more profound lies in the human experience. Something that defies biological explanation. 

        Strengthened by the concessions of so many scientists, who confess that there can be no agreeable definition for consciousness, I am driven to describe an unscientific place. In here, love can be never polluted by the instruments of explanation. Indescribable motives for the betterment of people and places they share. Here, happiness can be separated from pleasure and sadness from selfish loss. Those who exist cannot see it. To do that, one must live.