one - our artificial life
Sometimes life feels like a movie and sometimes it feels like a simulation. At times it feels like I’m the only person in this world and no one else even exists and at other times it feels like I’m a drop in a sea of colorful people.
It’s very easy to disassociate from reality sometimes, to ask yourself what’s real? What am I doing here? What’s the purpose of anything and everything? It’s also very easy for me to get lost. I often find myself standing at a tipping scale with life, always torn between living my reality and questioning it.
I think too much for my own good, and that’s why I write. I don’t know how to explain what I’m feeling but I’m curious if other people feel this way too. The world around me is constantly switching, pulling me between artificial and authentic filters. Sometimes I feel like an outsider, like when you read a story from a third point of view, and you can’t seem to touch anything or anyone, like it’s all made of plastic and set up in front of me to watch. Then at other times, I am so immersed into my experiences, and it feels like everyone is so full of life and color and everything bursts of flavors and emotions and I feel it all so deeply, so authentically.
Life itself puzzles me, it scares me how much we don’t know and what little control we hold. We float around this world and accept the unknown, and sometimes I accept that and other times it doesn’t sit right with me that I don’t know all that I don’t know.
It seems to me that everyone else has just accepted our meaningless lives or created their own meaning. Everyone seems to have created their own answers to my questions and maybe that’s how they make peace. But me, I don’t understand. We are millions upon millions of funny looking breathing specimens, we’re all just a bunch of cells, scattered across a floating rock in the middle of space with absolutely no purpose to serve. It almost feels like an experiment that we’re fitted into these artificial civilizations with our paper houses and neighborhoods placed neatly next to each other, like we’re being watched to see what we do. In the same way you put a hamster in a cage with some toys and it believes that’s its entire life. That hamster has no idea what’s outside his little cage. I believe we are the hamsters of this universe. The universe is much too big for our little earth to be the only main attraction, the only source of life or meaning.
What even is our meaning? Our earth rotates on money making hierarchies, our core existence and all the complexity that builds up our beautiful ecosystems and organisms all depend on money, on paper. We live for pieces of paper and base our entire existence around it. We need it just as much as our bodies naturally rely on water and oxygen. We have made paper another one of our needs, we spend all our time and lives chasing paper and investing paper and saving paper and spending paper. But I believe there’s more for us than money. I don't think its just us left to the decisions we make and the societies we create.
This world is way too messy and chaotic for us not to be some sort of experiment or simulation. We have no control in this life, not to the things that happen to us or around us. All the suffering and pain and celebration and lack of justice and joy and inequality, what is behind all that? Not a single person in this world has any idea what’s actually going on or what we’re doing in this life, or what we’re supposed to be doing. Sure, people make their own answers and find their own purposes, but who’s to say they’re right? Why don’t we as a whole have a united purpose? A shared and clear answer of our existence.
So all I’m saying is if we don’t have any control or answers, someone or something definitely does. It could be god, it could be life in our solar system that we haven’t found yet, it could be anything. We humans think we are so advanced, that science is enough to fill in all the blanks but maybe some things don’t want to be found. Maybe there’s a secret that none of us are in on. We can do our research and go into outer space and conduct experiments and find faith in god and still, with all that and more, there will always be things we will never know and never find and that blows my mind because it could easily be our sole purpose of existence and we’re all just walking around without a single clue.
I feel like my entire life is some sort of test, and all I want is to pass. I wonder if anyone else has these thoughts. So again, if you ask me why I’m at a tipping scale, torn between living my reality and questioning it, this is why.
