Life is difficult enough to add more suffering to it. In this post I am going to talk about how I freed myself from several layers of bullshit that were making my life miserable. I have always been an anxious person, and due to my Internet usage and other personal issues, I ended up in quite a terrible mental state. I will not follow any particular order, so please, bear with me.
One of the first steps in pursuing a healthier and more peaceful way of living was redefining my relationship with pleasure. Pleasure is necessary; surrendering to our instincts is not. It is important to enjoy daily pleasures in moderation, whatever it is that you love. It could be a little aperitivo before lunch, a little bit of cheese, a beer after a long day, etc. Simple pleasures allows us to bring some spark into our daily lives and they do not even need to be expensive. The fact that we can keep them simple, yet enjoyable, can prevent us from dangerously indulging in them.
Another issue that I had was that of external influences. At some point in my life, I became religious as a way of coping with some difficult circumstances I was facing. To this thing in particular I had to add the fact that I researched a lot about different belief systems. This gave me some knowledge about our world but it ended up bringing chaos into my already weak mental health. The Internet is filled with a vast array of different opinions, voices, arguments, debates, and my mind could not take it anymore. I had to remove this from my life. The more I grow up, the more difficult I find it to listen to someone talking about something that cannot be seen just to convince me of something that cannot be proven. I do not have all the answers, but neither do they. I also reject religion’s more popular sister, spirituality. I hate vagueness in communication and, as an adult, I cannot tolerate other adults talking in such vague and flimsy terms.
We are religious by nature, it is one of the evolutionary traits that we have inherited from our ancestors, and it totally makes sense. Of course we are going to feel small and wonder who created such a magnificent planet, or where do we go after we die. These are totally valid questions. The problem resides in the answers. I face life with humility and I try to embrace the uncertainty of it. I do not know for sure where I am going to go after I die (if we do go somewhere at all), but neither do you. You might have some beliefs about it, but until it happens (and I hope that takes a long, long time) you will not know for sure, if ‘knowing’ is even a term that could be used in that circumstance. In the midst of all uncertainty, I choose to embrace my honest ignorance about it and just live as peacefully as I possibly can. I do not need more worries, our generation already has enough. I thought religion would make me more peaceful, but it actually did the opposite. Everything feels calmer now.
In the meantime, I read, write, love my people, enjoy some awesome food, devote all the time that I can to the things I am passionate about, and continue to learn about this world we inhabit. I do not waste my precious time anymore trying to find a label that would suit me. There are more interesting ways of losing my time. I am neither an atheist, nor an agnostic: I simply do not care. If God exists and he judges me after I die, I hope he finds a peaceful man that has tried his best, and if that is not enough, well, then that is not a God I am willing to worship.
Liberating myself from religion did not make me feel disconnected, on the contrary: it made me feel even more connected to everything around me. It did not make me a nihilist, nor a relativist. I do not need religion to find transcendence. Personally, I find transcendence in nature, human connections, and art.
I have stopped trying to look for answers to the big questions, I refuse to participate in those inquiries altogether. I do not even waste time trying to figure out the ‘meaning’ of life, what a ridiculous pursuit. Trying to ask life what its meaning is to me feels like asking a fish if he can do math: the question does not even make sense to begin with. As a philologist by training, I understand that words have meaning, life does not. But that does not mean that life is meaningless, that just means that the word ‘meaning’ cannot be attached to the word ‘life’ in the same way that a bird cannot support a soccer team, it just does not work like that. ‘Meaning’ and ‘life’ belong to two different categories, they do not match. Life just is. What a liberating thought!
There are a lot of gurus on the internet trying to convince us to go ‘on a journey’ to discover what the meaning of life is to us. This is just another one of these rat races they want to keep us on. If I told you to go on a journey that has no end and that is going to exhaust you, what would you say to me? Wouldn’t you feel that I am deceiving you? This is how these people sound to me, and I do not care if it is a self-help guru, a Buddhist monk, or a Catholic priest. Every single person that tells us to go on a journey that we cannot finish is trying to deceive us just so they can continue selling their advise, books, and products to us. I am so tired of charlatans. Now every single thing is a journey, it is so tiring; leave me alone!
Understanding how language is used and manipulated to influence us is a really important step to reduce the amount of bullshit in our lives. There are so many fixed expressions that are being thrown at us and we do not even question them. Words like ‘journey’, ‘purpose’, ‘meaning’, ‘community’, ‘identity’, etc. only increase the length of the eternal rat race (if that is logically possible) and only serve the purpose of keeping us trapped in a certain way of thinking. No, you do not have an identity, you have a personality. Identity is a communal thing, not individual. We are not brands, we are people. There are so many other examples, but analyzing them would make this post way longer than it should be.
In summary, removing mental clutter, breaking free from linguistic prisons, rejecting impossible expectations and spiritual fear, and focusing instead on being a better person, finding transcendence in daily life, and enjoying the things that I love made my life a more peaceful one. There is so much to learn and so many things to enjoy in this life, so why waste our time being trapped in mental prisons instead of breaking free and being independent at last? Living is difficult as it is, we should not add more problems to it. Life is enough, just go live it.