'dis is the problem

Having considered for almost each day of the last several years, that partly or in full, my life sucked beyond imagination, I was considerably pleased (if in a sad way) to learn that such a feeling is almost universal and I wasn't really alone. It seems like this "dissatisfaction" or "discontent" is rife and part of almost everyone's daily existence, almost as routine, as significant and sometimes as unobtrusive as the involuntary act of breathing.

I don't know why I was surprised to know that most people share these inner gnawings, the feeling that something isn't quite there and whether there's still a long way to go (which presupposes that there is some hope ahead for us). For I'm not uncommon. Perhaps it is those that we idolize who we use to self-delude - they are so talented, so perfect, so full of innate strength and determination that fate bows to them in the end and fairy tales change plotlines midway in deference to their magnetism. It would be better for us to hope to emulate those who've fought inspite of, those who didn't have much of it but stole it in some Promethean triumph and even those who fell flat in a ditch while shooting at a star. Worship the former but follow the latter.

It is really remarkable, this dissatisfaction. Like so much around us, it seems unlikely to have been borne out out of chance. Your choice of faith in the matter of how things came into being doesn't matter here, your god or your neo-darwinian alternate could perhaps one day explain the need for the countless minor skirmishes, of the conflicting wills of people who want much of the same, like thousands of contestants loose in a mega musical-chairs melee, or tiny spheroids in a pinball game looking for their slots. For much of this discontent derives from questions such as "where is my own little groove" or even "is there such a thing as my own place". Even if you tell us that there aren't any such things as destiny or even a egoistic pre-ordained place for us, we couldn't be deceived by it, even if it be the truth.

If you were being positive about it, perhaps it is this restlessness that drives everything around us. If it weren't for this Brownian motion, perhaps we wouldn't dare to throw fatalistic dice, or juggle four burning torches, or peer beyond the horizons. I would've personally preferred to visit each slot one by one and see if that was the groove for me, but sadly that doesn't happen. Sometimes it gets very random as if DNA left his Improbability Drive running. It takes a lot of guts to let go of the safe toeholds and jump off. Will you land on your feet? Only cats seem to be blessed with the certainty of this (and they can also see in the dark AND have nine lives to pick off from, so it's clearly a lopsided competition - no wonder they have such contempt for us!). Entropic stagnation, anybody?

Someone's clearly spinning the roulette, but what makes it infuriating is that sometimes we can choose the number we want to stop at. For a race that's only known about quantum mechanics for less than a hundred years (which, at the risk of overestimation only about a percent of the world's population can comprehend), perhaps it just is too much to get a measure of why things are the way they are. Let alone a puny post on a forlorn page of an obscure blog hosted by a popular service on magnetic material in an undisclosed city on a large mass of land on a green-blue planet circulating around a large, unregarded lump of hydrogen and what-not (yes, yes, we're getting there thanks to popular demand) at the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy. (That reminds me, I've got to purchase a digital watch - what a neat idea!)

Of course, this is written in a mood that reeks of candy-floss (industrial strength) philosophy that pessimists may scoff at, but let me inform you, my dear mush-massacring-mercenaries, that it's meant to be in an air of steely optimism. Perhaps you should have visited me three weeks ago - you could've jumped off the white cliffs with me... (and he ruins it by resorting to cheap, symbolic allusions.)