| The Purpose of Life... |
[Mar. 16th, 2008|08:17 pm] |
..is something that eludes me. Sorry for those of you who read the title who thought I might have made some remarkable revelation. All I have managed to come up with so far is the very pragmatic notion that the question of the purpose of life assumes that life even has a purpose to begin with. Only living creatures that are somehow aware of their own aliveness could want to ponder it. However, some stuff has been happening to me lately that has made me realize that, in fact, there is actually a little more to human beings existence than simply some desire to reconcile and justify ourselves being here that is based from a latent pattern-recognition system we have hard-wired in our brains. But I digress...
I have been feeling very uncreative for the past few years. It could have a lot to do with the fact that I have actually not been very creative for the past few years. And whenever I don't do something creative for creativity's sake, I feel very unproductive. And this unproductive feeling is uncorrelated to how much work I have managed to do at my job. I have kind of come to the realization that, to be truly happy, I wasn't meant to work a regular 9-5 job. I have also come to the realization that there is a very small niche for people who don't work regular 9-5 jobs and it will be very unlikely that I will be able to leave that realm.
Nontheless, irrespective of how many widgets I can actually produce at wherever it is I am working, I feel very unproductive when I am not creative. It is something I have thought about a lot, especially ever since I have moved to Arizona which has been scientifically proven to be a black hole of culture and creativity; not even artistic skills can survive in the desert, which is why anyone talented from here manages to find a way to move far away. Every time I think of how empty I feel when not doing something creative, I am reminded of a Home Improvement episode. In this episode, Wilson tells Tim that men try to create things because men can't have babies. The tool man does his trademark grunt in inquisitive form, and Wilson follows up by saying that since women are the ones that create life, men innately feel compelled to create anything else they can that they may feel improves (or in come cases, destroys) life. Mulling over this has lead me to wonder how much of the crap that has gone on in out history has been a direct result of men trying badly to justify their own necessity.
On thinking about this very fundamental truth, I cannot help but wonder; would I feel 'uncreative' if I were a woman, knowing that I would have the ability to bring another life into this world? Do I somehow feel empty when I am not playing with a photo in Photoshop, drawing something out or making yet another .gmax rendering of a building because I subconsciously think that a life spent not doing these things would be a life wasted? Or is it some sort of evolutionary self-preservation tactic devised by the creator to ensure that men don't get too distracted with beating the crap out of one another to go and become fathers and raise a family? I don't know.
Since I am more than likely not going to become a best-selling author or world-famous artist, I have to acknowledge that I will be a blue-collar slob who won't have an entry in the history books or a Wikipedia article. However, I am okay with that. The question I have is this: Knowing all of this, how can I still make a positive impact on humanity; do something for mankind that betters it, even if I am never acknowledged for it? That, at least right now, I don't know. |
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