So I'd like to think of myself a wise old man sitting on my mountain sucking on my pipe-of-wisdom as many younglings come to me to make sense of the world around them
Of course I'm probably not that old, or even that sensible. One of life's lies is that wisdom comes with age, and unfortunately it does not, wisdom comes from learning from your mistakes and picking yourself out of the rubble and carrying on. Very little lessons are learned from rolling over and dying, or telling everyone that you're disadvantaged.
Life is hard, plain and simple. It was never meant to be easy. In fact we've came this far in life and found a cure for almost every human disease in history because of the struggle we've been through and the destruction it's caused. Not only 100 years ago did our grandparents have 7-10 kids and only 5 of them would make it out of childhood. Childhood diseases were rampant and if you ask any nan or grandad they'll tell you.
And through this struggle; the wars, the strife, the agony, the death and destruction; humans have overcome it all. And we sit here in 2024 in a sort of waypoint. A fork in the road, or maybe not even that, maybe a slow decline. As our struggles become less and less, there are no more challenges to face, nothing to overcome, nothing to fight against. At least in the west anyway.
Perhaps that's why we are seeing the rise in all this antagonism on each side of the Political sphere -- absent any real fight people have taken it upon themselves to invent causes to fight against / towards. Part of being human is the will to strive and fight. If there is nothing to fight for or struggle against then we wither away and get weaker.
That's why we see more rise of fresh faced kids. Kids that would scream and cry at the sight of anything that might slightly damage them in any way. I was one of those kids mind you, but I was few and far between. I was bullied at home and school because of how gentle and soft I was -- literally every man my mother dated wanted to "toughen me up" in some way. But I was an outlier 35 years ago. Cases like me were not the normal.
But now it's becoming the normal. As times get easier and our struggles become less, human evolution is birthing kids to a less harsh world, a world with less struggles. One where parents tell their offspring that they can be anything they want to be, and that the world was made for them. Schools try and remove any sort of potential harm in the way of learning, and the Internet is becoming more and more authoritarian in its view to policing "out-there" content.
So in a world that has the safety rails up in the bowling alley for anything you put your mind to, be the person that tells the operator to take the rails down. Because for the ones that practise with the rails down, they will be the ones that learn to get really good at the game; knowing what to avoid so the ball doesn't go into the gutter.
And as everyone is around you complaining how hard life is, and how privileged other people are because they have it better them, be the person that learns to pick themselves up after a beat down. Be the person that learns how to avoid certain traps through trial and error, and be the person that learns to get themselves out there, knowing full to well the horrors that lie in await.
In short the secret to life is doing something. Whatever. As long as it's useful. Start something new, force yourself to talk to someone you've always wanted to, learn a skill you never knew you had it in you to learn.
The world is your oyster when you share the world world with a bunch of "can't do's," "I don't have time's" and "I'm too busy watching netflix's." Especially when you're a "sure, let's do this sort of person."
The secret to life is just doing. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less.
