Fork in the Road
LET’S face it, our world is moving towards an uncertain future day by day. Predicting the future is more difficult today than ever before! Do we continue to evolve with all these developments?
British naturalist Sir David Attenborough states that we stopped natural selection as soon as we started being able to rear 95 to 99 per cent of babies that are born.
We are the only species that, by its own free will, stops natural selection. According to Attenborough, the current evolutionary process is cultural. In other words, we take the information inherited from previous generations and build on it. Our knowledge is increasing, but our pain is decreasing?
Our pessimistic philosopher Schopenhauer says: “The greater the knowledge, the greater the suffering.” It tells us that we have been chasing meaningless goals throughout our lives. This is literally a vicious circle. So what are we going to do? We step into life with the expectation of happiness and pleasure. But this is all an illusion. Our master says that the sane person does not pursue what is nice, but to not cause pain. We make a strong start to our lives; as children we learn, grow and change rapidly.
But as many people graduate from school and start their careers, this growth slows down and eventually turns into a crawling, boring recession. One of the most important reasons for this is that we ignore the things that cause us pain in our lives.
Our prejudices on this matter are so strong and so self-reinforcing that they make us believe that life should be a certain way. We are conditioned to the necessity of having big goals.
We educate our children in this direction. But the most important point we missed for our own lives and the future of our children is that we have to be happy before we reach our goals. In 2013, Professor Shigehiro Oishi and Ed Diener wrote a unique analysis by Gallup for the journal PsychologicalScience, involving 142,000 participants from 132 countries.
This survey is regarded as one of the most comprehensive surveys ever conducted on health and happiness. The initial findings were not surprising, as you can imagine: people in richer countries were, on average, more satisfied with their lives. However, investigating the relationship between wealth and perceived meaning and happiness in life, Oishi and Diener found the opposite pattern: people in richer countries were more likely to report that their lives lacked an important purpose, meaning, and happiness.
The way to add meaning to our lives and to be happy is through making and giving others happiness. Giving is the most powerful system that will bring happiness into your life.
A diploma, a reward, a big business deal, a new home, a new car, or any other achievements definitely bring good feelings, but you can’t be happy to go after them, they are not the ultimate goal.
Perhaps the most basic condition to survive in such a spooky world system is to know yourself by thinking as much as you can and know what you can really get out of life and what you can give to those around you.
As Marx said in the CommunistManifesto in 1848, “everything that is solid evaporates into the air” and our entire social and economic structure has almost evaporated. We all need to look around.
Many businesses are closing down, many of our friends are unemployed, we live in a period when our tomorrows are so uncertain. The question “what can I give, what can I do” is becoming a more important and valid question than ever before.
These days will pass, maybe we will overcome more difficult days. As a country, we are at a crossroads together. We all need to help those around us in need of this kind of help these days.
Maybe we have not been able to build our pandemic hospital yet, we have not been able to get education on track, we have not been able to improve the working conditions and quarantine conditions of our doctors, but we must forget that we will overcome all these difficulties together.
In these days when elections are approaching, we need to talk about how we can overcome the difficulties, leaving aside division and polarisation. We must forget that the decisions we make and the choices we make today will determine the dream of a healthy country with a strong education and health system that stands on its own feet.
All of our politicians and candidates must be in an understanding that will leave daily interests and unite everyone and produce policies that we can surpass today.
Being a candidate for state administration requires this. The coronavirus continues to show us the fact that we cannot reach anywhere with old-fashioned discourses, agriculture, tourism, construction, education, even if it is painful.
We can no longer live to sit back and watch the world. We must have the courage to take steps that will take us further. In doing so, we should have the courage to leave behind all our burdens and dreams about the past and to progress and dream new dreams despite all the suffering.