Human Convention
No matter how you’ll live, you’ll always die alone.
Rats! A bit gruesome and deathly to be starting off a lyrical essay with such a dark foreboding quote isn’t it? And, I get it, if you’re not one for thinking about your inevitable demise. It’s not a thought most people like considering while they experience their life. Most people know it’s coming and whether it be the doctor’s diagnosis or the fear that randomly a giant fluffy duck would fall out of the sky and squash you into jam and jelly, the fear that at some point in their life they will lose control of the one thing that holds them to this realm is quite potent in many people.
Fear, being such a mistress for torture, toys with that and throws us every day into an endless dance of morals and facts, life and death, chocolate milk or plain milk. Decisions decisions, because that’s the one freedom we have with fear. If you’re one for drinking chocolate milk while your friends bash on you with their pure 2% milk compound of chemicals that don’t contain chocolate, you might find yourself in an argument.
Fear controls most of that argument. No one ever wants to be seen as some idiot who doesn’t understand how taste works, or how to present themselves. Because that’s the true fear of that argument; to have someone see through what character and what person is presented in front of them. No one likes being wrong and certainly, no one likes being told that their wrong because it means for them they failed to understand a concept others seem to grasp.
Do you fear Death?
It turns out that the most feared thing in the world is public speaking, with death coming into a close second. It makes sense, for some part, that our ultimate fear would involve the communication of an idea without any chance for anyone else to comment on it. It’s hard to know what someone is thinking and for all your knowledge everyone in that room could be against you and that picture on the wall is writing an angry comment at you on its Twitter. To be alone in your thoughts, to be alone on your stage, and to be alone in your fear. Whether it be public or private speaking, communication is how you show off your ideas, show empathy and sympathy, and most importantly show that whoever you’re talking to has the right to understand and be understood. Socialization is a dance of listening and arguing figuring out what kind of pizza your friend best fits as, and caring for them when the world drowns out their voice.
For that, I believe is the greatest gift life has to offer. The option in anyone’s life is that they can communicate any thought or idea that comes to their mind. And that’s crazy, isn’t it? The fact the mind can imagine anything, and that we can tell each other to imagine that same stuff? It’s bound to be lost in translation somehow someway sometimes or taken away from you, but it’s always there as an option.
The world would be a very different place if the only minds that built things for everyone did it by themselves, without the fear that their idea might fail without the help of others. For fear is not evil, it’s a necessary motivator. The gift we’re given does not become a gift if it’s one we can do easily. Our gift allows us to combat fear, twist it, and use it for our own voice and in some scenarios even bestow that gift onto others voices who might sing more silently.
But sometimes,
Well, it gets the better of us sometimes.
Turns out the biggest epidemic sweeping the world isn’t the invention of fingerless gloves, it’s the invention of lying and the invention of duality in fear. That you should always live in fear because somehow someway you’re failing at something everyone else is doing better than you. So of course, you lie, because you want to be better than them. That is fear.
I’m sure it doesn’t take an expert to find examples of politicians and other powerful figures lying, as it’s estimated at least once a day even you will tell a lie. Whether it’s a white lie, or just telling someone what they want to hear, lies create the true game of fear that comes with socialization and it’s integrated into every part of our modern-day culture.
Money is a great example of a lie, because really, what value does this little green piece of paper really have? If anything, it’s just good kindling. Food and necessities become bound to this paper though, and all of a sudden hearing about someone using it as toilet paper seems idiotic and egotistical. We’ve built up our entire world under the idea that in order to be successful you need to have tons of these kinds of papers, that the number of that is high enough that you can live in a house too big for even a family of 8. But that fear, the fear of being seen as poor and as worthless kicks us into overdrive to obtain this money. It becomes even worse because now without money you can’t even live. When did a token mean for occasional trading become the root cause of societal hunger, death, and almost every problem in the world? It’s the best lie there is, because now it’s advertised to everyone in the world, and if you have enough, you can run parts of the world. It’s interesting how society gradually changed that fear of not having enough to trade, to now not enough to eat through the invention of money. Money provides a solution and a problem for fear and so becomes so sacred as a tool for people to use.
But lies are not all so grand you see, as maybe those cookies grandma baked weren’t up to their usual standards, and you don’t want to let her know. Subconsciously, you now created a divide between yourself and that individual because now you know something they don’t, and you don’t plan on letting them understand it. You’ve removed their right to understand, and to be understood because now you’ve taken away the ability to exercise that right by lying. Socialization is weird in that way because it’s all about understanding and shit it’s hard to understand people sometimes.
Those people, those idiots who don’t understand that plain milk is good. It is good. How is it not good? It’s literally just chocolate milk without the chocolate, how isn’t that good. It should be fundamental that plain milk is good. Why can’t they understand? Why don’t I understand them?
There is a sadness, in the realization that you may never see certain friends again. Sometimes, that person you just argued with about milk might be the last time you ever talk to that person. Both of you will split, and go on with the merry walk in the concrete human convention. 10, 20, 30 years go by, and you might remember a conversation or two from that interaction and you’ll wonder how that person is doing. Maybe they’re a billionaire now and joined the lie of money, or maybe they’ve grown past these societal chains and are living off-grid doing their own thing. But as you imagine that person you’ve not talked to in a long time, realize how cool that is. The fact you can remember a person from another time, about an idea that happened years ago and with people who’ve changed and look different since then. Despite reality changing them, you visualize them as when they were younger and know about them through that person they were years ago. That those same times you remember that person as being older or younger, those people think of you in that similar way. That fear of being annoying to that person so long forgotten about and the fear that those experiences affected you negatively is long gone.
The duality of fear is that at the moment it will consume you and swear it’s taking you over. But once it’s over it’ll be like it never happened and you’ll want something like it again. Chasing that fear, that excitement is our endless crusade for happiness. Money brings the opportunity to experience fear, and others bring the opportunity to share the fear. In times where we feel like we’re dying, another person can understand, imagine and even sometimes feel the same pain we might’ve felt years ago. But just like those people you remember long ago, those same fears and experiences of sadness and torture that might’ve consumed your life at the time once gone will never happen again in that same way, and those negative experiences will heal and grow with time even if you believe they won’t.
Everything is an analogy of this. The human experience can be defined from being consumed at the moment feeling like every second takes an hour to happen, or time went too fast and you want it to happen again. Time is an illusion, a human invention. Watches, weekdays, years, just another convention.
Imagine if those experiences didn’t go away? Imagine those experiences stuck with you as if they happened yesterday, all experiences you’ve ever had feeling fresh and overwhelming, all those boring and happy times playing at once in your mind, every single friend at the top of your agenda, every thought communicated and thought about always leading back onto each other in a never-ending conversation.
That would suck
But happily, you die with yourself in control. Happily, you die alone. So live life to the fullest. You don’t die in fear. You don’t die with yourself years ago, you die with yourself today, not from years ago. So yeah, the world may suck, and you might not be able to control it, but you’re in control of yourself, and that does a lot more good.