Time and again when I visit Mumbai and happen to observe the struggle ( described as animal like by a friend) that people go through every day I go back to the perpetually elusive question that has been plaguing me since past few years. What is the point of everything? Why do we exist? What we running after? Is there a goal or an objective at the end or the billions of humans treading this earth are just doing the same thing over and over again just for the sake of doing .Rather than the achievement of any specific and definable aim ? What has the existence of centuries of life on earth counted to? Is all this frivolous? Are we here just because the odds were in the favor of the genesis of life thus culminating in the right conditions during the big bang (of course to the subject that we are smart enough to find out what really happened when all this began )?
Humans might continue to exist for as many moon life cycles as the number of stars being born everyday but will this lead to anything? Except than being involved among ourselves, what do we truly stand for? Sartre in his controversial play “No exit” said that “Hell is other people”. If you really think it is empirically true. Let’s go back to the beginning when we assume that the 1st few Neolithic humans started to exist. They reproduced and created more like them. The world for them would have been mysterious but serenely at peace. Imagining living your life like a 1 year old for whom everything is new. Don’t you wish that were possible? So Man created more Men resulting in the aphorism “Child is the father of man “. This led to the classic economic problem of efficient allocation of resources. When these problems were created few of them moved on to look for greener pastures, something like diversification into new markets.
This process continued for ages and ages. In between man learnt how to hate, kill other men, greed, envy and similar other terms. This led to the creation of justifications and punishments which eventually led to the concept of the modern society /civilization and religion if we keep an objective view. Yes, Man is capable of solving his problems and has done so for millions of years. But who created these problems in the first place? Was it not the acts and whims of men? So now Man has become a vehicle of cleaning fellow men’s dirty deeds (Do we smell lawyers/consultants/ even doctors here?). The problem aggravated and has become so big that practically whatever anyone does , at least in the terms of earning a living , is to solve the problems created by others who were before them.
Thus in a way the existence of men has been defined by men themselves. In simple terms this is just the bartering of goods and service to run the economy. The matter though is not simple as we can show by drawing beautiful artless looking graphs. What about the suffering which has been created? The alleviation of suffering has become a big industry now and is regarded as the best one. But again my fundamental question, why did man create this problem? Come to think of it, the ‘Original Sin’ is probably the most important piece of knowledge which we know. It kind of answers the question of what created all this mess in this beautiful world. Sartre was right in his thought of ‘Hell is other people’ but unknown to himself he proved the existence of the ‘Original Sin’.
So, Man is doing what he created for himself to do. Yes I am wrong since I am not discounting the fact that natural calamities do exist and related issues. But then was Man even supposed to be present when those calamities struck? What if the deviation of rivers was a predestined phenomenon for the sustenance of earth and man was not supposed to be present there? Earthquakes would not have been so devastating had man not created concrete structures.
I am not saying that man should not have done anything. Action is the most revered word and everyone should do the work or action required from him. But why? Just so that his actions result in some more work which would require more action from Man? Why it is that man is always coaxed to work and work and never to actually think and introspect. Why? Is there any bigger aim? Or is all of this merely “Pointless”
