"How can a knowledgeable person be truly happy without detachment, isolation and pretense?" has been the question that I started to ponder in the past few days. As it seemed to me, whenever I had felt happy in these few years of my life, I was intertwined either with romance or with the lesser-mind, or with a particular professional pursuit whose very foundation is inhumanity itself.
People like me often inherit a habit, save the correctness debate aside, to be able to remain unaffected in light of changes, turbulences and mire. After all, that's how they emerge from the constraints of their reality, and more often than not, the constraints of themselves, to carry on the journey that befits their goal. Yet, the deeper I dive into such a habit, the clearer it becomes to me that this journey is a lonesome one. I've met some like-minded people, some of whom I appreciated and admired greatly. But they all, without exception, seem to content in their own state of contrivance where the majority are but bemused babies, the morality an inevitable yet artificial fruit of human civilization, and that love, friendship, passion, and spite biochemical products that only drive the material part of a human soul. Mind, to them, and to a certain degree, to me, is where the truly transcendental, divine intellect rests.
I have been wrenching myself, that I couldn't derive joy from Facebook or beer or festivals, that I couldn't bear a conversation that has no value or has no end, that I watch Brexit only with cold, calculated and contemptuous neglect, and that, even during the very few times I weep, I weep not to the benevolent acts that would normally cause a man to weep, but to a voluntary urge of feeling humane. As if to the all of my emotions, most of them are merely intricate designs to be performed with a cultivated sincerity likened to that of a seasoned actor. Only the bewilderment, the wrench, and a secretive and abstract yearning to be like the common folks remain. These emotions are so deeply hidden, and well-tailored, that even when completely put out there and exposed, they won't have any discernible weight on my psychological scale. To most people, I probably am living in an unnecessarily idealistic world. But at the same time, they could know too, that living in their world, is my own idealistic twang.
Unlike the many of whom I know, who have chosen various fields and crafts to pertain, I haven't. I'm not interested in artificial intelligence, or linguistics, or physics, or HR, or FinTech, or anything written on my list of interests on LinkedIn for that matter. I'm only interested in using my capability to gain the resources to fulfill. To fulfill what needs or will I truly don't know. Only in the immediate future do I know that I need to care about things that I don't like to acknowledge I have, like career, debt, and tuition fees. For unlike the rest of whom I know, in my mind are only mediocre, sometimes even pathetic misgivings. Therefore, I cannot have faith in the nobler things that are too distant to me; only in the reversion of suffering, of material lack, and of not being able to afford to eat does my faith flower.
Ugh! Ugh! But the grand schemes of things, of these arrangement that have been statistically allocated to me, they are quite interesting. They represent to me the many facets others would never have the chance to peek in; in this playing field of mine are ranches, discarded shoes, noodle packages, beer bottles and dead batteries. These are what I have. Neither inferior nor superior to the shiny stadium or meager land some others may have. I work out my own arrangement, contribute my own effort, shed my own sweat, to make it artistic and deep.
But who knows? Someone could have come and put a pair of glasses on anything, and yell, "look, this is art! This is artistic!"
For after all, who are we but a pair of glasses with life.
