If you are afraid of something, which in our modern world is just about everything because of the media loop that we are all plugged into, you are more apt to just do your job as a gear in the machine and keep things as they are, where basically nothing happens outside of what you’re told is supposed to happen, and if something happens that we didn’t expect we fall into at least a mild state of panic because we aren’t prepared to respond to it. The conundrum is that those who question based on the societal conditioning of absolutes, also waste their lives away demanding that things are never what we are told they are; so even in questioning the absolutes that we are force fed, we are demanding that another absolute exists. Those who listen often question, but more as compliant, and those who question listen more than they would ever admit, as is evident by their blatant opposition and obvious insecurities.
Once you question long enough you stop listening, and you basically live in the madness of no one understanding that another alternative exists, but your alternative as an absolute is just as bad as everyone else’s reality because to truly question, in a world of absolute theory, not subjective reality (which I’m pretty confident are the same thing), you must also respect that souls may choose not to question and still be perfectly fine with that; to question is also to question yourself and accept that the solution only exists in the answers that work for the way you perceive things, whilst remaining in thus and not being afraid of that.
You either live in fear of what they’re telling you to be afraid of, or you live in the fear that nothing is what they tell you and we, as a society, are doomed to never understand and always live in this hamster wheel. The hamster wheel of the listener leads to misery because we either aren’t getting what we’re told we’re supposed to want or have or need after jumping through all the required hoops, or we do get what we want or “need,” only to discover that it doesn’t bring us the comfort or happiness that we were told we would feel because we’ve let go of the comfort and happiness that already existed, but we were told didn’t exist because things are supposed to be how they told you they would be to keep us running our tired asses off on this journey to get what we never really wanted or needed.
The hamster wheel of the questioner leads to misery because nothing will ever be how we think it should be, so we keep searching. There is comfort in understanding that everyone is right if they want to be, and nothing will ever be what we think it is, but in getting off all the hamster wheels and just being, we are often creating an existential vacuum for ourselves. If everyone is right if they want to be, and you accept that the answers that seem so obvious to you only exist in your delusion, then what’s the point in attempting to change anything? Just live your life and accept the fact that while everything may be in question, everything in question is also true to anyone who believes it, right? That certainly takes any purpose out of my existence. Then Victor Frankl points out to me, in his defining logotherapy, the meaning of life, which can be found in three simple things: by creating work or doing a deed; by experiencing something or encountering someone; and by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.
What if those first two generally test the third? What if we need to eliminate the first two to avoid the third, or change your perception so drastically that you are throwing away meaning to find meaning or attain meaning, when the latter of the three embodies existence itself, though some choose to suffer in nothing, while others think nothing of suffering. Is this me failing at the third? Stepping back from my work and looking at myself is like getting lost in an Escher, and I don’t like it. I think I’m beginning to understand that I’ll never understand, and no one can understand that. The closer you get to a point, the more it becomes a circle.
