It’s 2022. The new year, an arbitrary occasion as it may be, presents an earmarked opportunity for introspection and planning. After spending a weekend staring at a screen and then regretting it, I am back – screen-staring and all.
I started reading Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow yesterday. Again. I hope to actually finish it this time so as to find out how I can start enjoying this banal enterprise called life. I am not the only one, of course. Most twenty-somethings will tell you that none of us know what we’re supposed to do with life. We question, we look for a bigger meaning in our mundane existence, we find none, we suffer. We turn to Nietzsche and Camus and Sartre, hoping that one of their many isms will make the disappointment, disdain and dread go away. We meditate, take Buddha’s word and try to detach, indulge in capitalistic self-care routines. And after a day’s hard work, when we reflect, the abjection weighs us down all over again.
If you’re waiting for a 101 on how to attain Nirvana, you’ve come to the right place. But I say, instead of asking how we can find peace, we question why we want to. In my (naive? iconoclast? cynical?) opinion, questions about meaning and purpose do not come from philosophical curiosity. They are born out of boredom. Every day, we wake up, eat, shit, pretend to work, go to sleep. We do it over and over again, until, inevitably, the stodgy cycle becomes too much and we begin to wonder why. Surely, there must be some purpose to be served, or at least a reward. Here’s the thing – happy are not those who dive deep into the trenches of philosophy and find meaning. Happy are those who do not question. The ones who are either too busy or who accept that eat-shit-sleep-repeat is the eternal verity. The secret to bliss is not in letting go of the world or looking for the transcendental truth; it is in acceptance of the world order. The only way for the millennial to be happy is by being busy. Is this happiness morally justifiable? That is for the philosophers to decide.