questions…
i guess i may just be going through some weird phase in life, but here's what's on my mind this morning at 2:30 am...
- for some things, right and wrong are undoubtedly clear. but for others, how do you really know? two extremely good people with two extremely good (albeit different) view points can really leave you in the middle, unsure of what the right answer is.
- why is it so easy to hurt someone you care about accidentally?
- why do people get carried away trying to live out the "american dream" (ie nice job, nice brick house with a white fence and a dog named spot?)
- why is life so repetitive and cyclic?
- why are we as humans so impatient?
- why are we as humans always looking to be accepted by others?
- why do we let what people say and think drive our actions and affect them so much?
- "history repeats itself" - but sometimes it doesn't... or does it?
- why is it that most of us are in much better shoes than so many people that we know, and yet we are still not happy?
- how do you distinguish people being "politically correct" with you and people treating you with sincerity?
- why do we try so hard to flaunt our accomplishments, yet at the same time rush to cover our weaknesses?
- if one dies an unexpected death tomorrow, would they have done anything to make the world a better place? would anyone besides their close family notice or care?
- why do the moments of happiness feel so short in comparison to the times of hardship?
- why does life feel so hard at times?
- how do you know who your real friends are?
before someone goes sheikh-style on me answering these questions, let me clarify one thing - i am not asking these questions from a religious perspective, i am just asking why we, as humans, feel this way about certain things.
December 6th, 2007 at 7:51 am
I think most of those questions relate to someone’s priorities in life. For example, several of these questions (6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 15) relate to what others think or what you think of others, and how much weight we put on such things.
I know you said not to shaykhify the question, but honestly, when I wonder the same things (and indeed I do, I have, and I probably will for a long time), I take solace in the deen and knowing that this life is transient and that something better waits for the believers in the afterlife. I don’t necessarily stop wondering completely, but I care less about these questions when I reflect on that.
And, of course, the countless aayaat and ahaadeeth that talk about these kinds of issues provide for me the answers…sorry, shaykhifying again…:-p
But seriously, these are traps of shaytaan designed to keep the people from being productive and benefiting themselves. Shaytaan holds little more love for the disbelievers than the believers, so he has no problem causing them to fall into despair along with us - it pulls them even further away from Allaah and closer to him.
Hey, I’m on YM almost all the time, buzz before you fall down that endless spiral!
December 6th, 2007 at 5:57 pm
To answer your last question, I think we feel this way because of the social constructs around us. For you, I believe it is your Muslim upbringing that shapes your persona and the American, “me, myself, and i” capitalistic drive — there are prolly more influences, but I am pointing out the most prominent and easiest.
The answers you seek will also be in those influences. Whichever makes you feel more comfortable is the answer that you will accept, unless you can formulate your own by sifting thru the gray areas.
The deeper you dive into those gray areas, the more questions you will ask yourself. Sometimes it is more healthy (not necc. better) to see black and white ….
December 7th, 2007 at 12:54 am
@basil - yes, i agree with your sheikhifying points
but yeah, i guess the problem for a lot of those questions is, as you mentioned, how much we care about others and how we let others influence our lives. i guess it’s much easier if you can just say, “here’s the way things are, i do the right thing, and i don’t care what anyone says or thinks…” - but it’s easier in theory than in practice, because even if you do the right thing and someone misunderstands it, you always feel obliged to go back and explain. it’s an endless cycle.
@wally - definitely society has a huge influence. but i am curious to what you mean by “the answers you seek will also be in those influences” - by this, do you mean that you have to understand why society (for example) is the way it is (or understand people’s basic motives, for example) in order to bring oneself to terms on these types of questions? the problem is that some things still remain gray, even when you reach this understanding. “sifting through the gray areas,” as you put it, while potentially a good exercise, certainly isn’t fun.
December 8th, 2007 at 9:12 am
1. re-examine what it means to label something as “right” versus labeling something as “wrong”. or look at it this way: suppose i have a faulty dishwasher, which only fails and throws soap everywhere whenever i’m at the apex of stress in my life. i could possibly say something like “that dishwasher is wrong and evil because it is maliciously messing with me”, does that mean my other appliances are “right and good” because they serve me faithfully?
the logical conclusion is that right and wrong are labels applied onto things and people based on their context, relative to the person experiencing them. it is the resolution of the paradoxical behavior of humans to war in order to create peace. until people recognize the notions of right and wrong as different labels for concepts and not as some kind of tangiable artifacts, then there will always be conflict when different ontologies collide in space.
2. if you care about someone, it is implicit you spend time with that person. therefore, the probability of saying something that comes across as hurtful increases. mathematically, you can show that you will hurt the people closest to you the most. also, people tend to be acutely aware of the shortcomings of those that they care about, and want to say or do something about it. that scenario causes a hurtful situation.
3. there are economic reasons for pusuing the american dream; just look at the different kinds of tax deductions. a person who wants to not marry, not have children, and not own a house but pursue different effects suffers on their 1040 and ends up subsidizing the “american dream behavior” of his neighbors (by a lot!). also, it has been extensively marketed to the population culturally and politically. such a life frees up the human to devote their time completely to earning money to pay the credit they used to purchase more and more material goods. is it any wonder retailers promote ads that show ideal “american families” running through their stores? or that this “dream” of locking somebody into a debt for 40 years isn’t appealing to credit card companies and banks? the United States of America is the world’s largest debtor’s prison, both in terms of area and population.
4. why are you allowing your life to become repetitive and cyclic? alter your daily routine in strange ways, and those alterations with in turn alter your perception of life. even something as simple as switching from cold to hot breakfast, driving a different route, standing on your head when you come home, walking around instead of eating lunch at work. the brain has a tendency to “lock-in” to repeated behavior. it’s a good thing, since without it, some people would forget to shower. however, modifications of the repeated behavior actually cause a physical reconfiguration in the brain. not quite as dramatic a change as the day after a 14 hour LSD trip, but it will alter your mind’s state in subtle ways.
5. we are impatient because we’re all going to die.
6. we look to be accepted by others because we have failed to accept ourselves. without accepting who we are first and foremost, we turn to outside sources to accept us. that is why religion is so compelling: a god who accepts anyone for whatever reason! when you come to terms with accepting who you are, the need to turn to others for acceptance diminishes and eventually becomes mu.
7. again, people’s actions and words affect us because we haven’t the confidence in our actions and words. we get angry at politicians because they don’t do what we’d do if we were in their shoes. or would we? what would you do if you were president? self-confidence is intrinsically tied to the previous question. one self-acceptance leads to self-confidence, the words and actions of others become mu.
8. you should rather ask “does the human condition repeat itself?” - and the answer is yes, unfortunately. people need to become better humans to stop the cycles, and that isn’t going to happen any time soon.
9. i don’t know what makes your shoes so special. happiness is not generated from the external because the internal language of happiness and external language of the world are incompatible entities. there is no way to describe your happiness to anything outside your brain. likewise, nothing outside your brain can communicate things to effect happiness.
10. you can’t.
11. because we’re insecure about our short-comings. see self-acceptance, self-confidence.
12. that depends on what you consider “making the world better”, a highly subjective and controversial topic. a person living the “american dream” makes the last payment on the house, the last payment on their kids’ college loans, breaks down dead in his driveway (next to his Ford Fusion, which is completely paid off). he lived a good life, always paid his taxes honestly, greeted his neighbors, was a good husband, when to the PTA meetings, sat on the neighborhood board, voted in all elections, took his vacations around his work, worked overtime when it was asked of him, and never complained about the 3% cost of living raises he was getting annually after good reviews. to many people, this was a “good” man (there’s that label again). to others, he contributed to overpopulation, the clothes he wore were made in sweatshops, the fuel in his car polluted the city, the low taxes he paid means he stole from the rest of society so he could live crime- and worry-free in his suburban enclave, the food he ate was bought cheaply from overseas due to tariffs which pushed many people into poverty, the politicians he voted for supported policies of causing mayhem in the world and torturing people. i didn’t answer your question.
13. happiness is a fleeting state of mind because no counterparts exist for it in the world external to the mind. however, there are plenty of concrete examples of hardship and suffering in the world, to which the brain can more readily map the emotional states onto.
14. because for whatever reason, these atoms decided to try and do something completely riduculous and we have to put up with it.
15. you don’t.
December 11th, 2007 at 1:32 am
*gasp* is it really who i think it is!?
i always knew that ∃! x : P(x) = ∅, i just didn’t know what that x was!
move zig for great justice!
December 13th, 2007 at 10:50 pm
you shouldn’t ask yourself questions at 2:30am.