Three friends, whom I have known since quite a bit of time, are now sleeping with the fishes, so as to say.
All deceased in three completely unrelated accidents.
Apart from drenching me in despair and creating anathema in me towards the Public Administration system in charge of the roads, it has set me off on an intense train of thought.
What is my life, but a speck of dust in this universe?
What do I hope to live and achieve?
What does my life mean to the world?
Plenty like me die every day and still many come into this world.
What is the objective of this birth?
No, I amn't quoting from The Gita...
The purpose of life as I see it can be broadly split into two windows, the two overlapping often.
One is survival and the other is reproduction.
As I started thinking on these lines, I realized that many of our instincts, actions and emotions are tied firmly to the two.
We feel pain when we are injured or sick. This discomfort or pain helps us realize that it may hamper our survival and help us rectify the cause.
However the average lifetime of a human is 60 years, because the reproductive systems would have been degenerated completely by that time and we would not be able to reproduce.
So, indirectly Nature has no use for us after we are past our sexual prime.
Even love/sexual feelings are maximum during the period where chances of reproduction are highest.
Attraction towards the opposite gender peaks during the age of 18-35, when the hormones manifest themselves and the odds of bearing an offspring are positive.
The joy that it is obtained during fornication induces the person to obtain that satisfaction again and again, increasing the probability of reproduction.
Coincidence? Maybe not!
On a different note, the unconditional and protective love shown by a parent on a child is caused by a desire to propagate their progeny, perhaps more than anything else.
We seek to live in groups, when we think it helps in our survival. And we would fight, when our existence is threatened.
The whole brouhaha behind higher education and earning more money and so on is to land with a good and compatible partner, so that the best possible offspring could be obtained.
The first half of our life focuses on finding the best available partner and the next half deals with making our offspring ready for the same process.
So on, most functions we perform (excluding some inexplicable perversions!) would be to help with survival or reproduction or both.
Some feelings such as hunger, lust, greed have been built into us for specific reasons.
On a broader scale, human life could have been so simpler, with just two primary functions.
But the world is now such a quagmire of emotions, complications and contraptions.
We are messing up our planet in hopes of finding a better place to live, only destroying the present en route.
The feelings are going out of control and hurting others.
But not to worry. Nature has a self-cleaning mechanism every few millennia, obviating any damage done to earth and providing an opportunity to start afresh.
A holistic and subtle understanding of the purpose we are alive, would perhaps help streamline our goals better.
And in the process, we can probably squeeze in a few more seconds, delaying the inevitable apocalypse a teeny-weeny bit.
To quote Pink Floyd
"All in all it's just another brick in the wall.
All in all you're just another brick in the wall."
Note: The author loves and values his parents & friends very much. The sarcastic and detached views expressed here are the result of extreme emotional distress and are of course, not permanent.
