Manifesto

Part I: Who Are We?

I find it pointless the way people try so hard to figure out the meaning of life, the key to true “human happiness”. Where is this going to get us? In a pile of confusion and frustration, that's all. I get so tired of questions like “What is the real way to live?” and “What is our purpose in life?” These questions are asked so many times to the point where for many, have begun to lose its meaning. It’s not natural to just raise a question like that and expect the person to have an answer on hand. We tune these questions out because they tend to get frustrating. I find that I come across bits and pieces of these answers during the most unexpected moments. Maybe it’s while I’m having the time of my life with my friends that I realize that those are the moments I should be striving for in life. Or maybe it’s at night when I’m thinking about death that I realize I need to cherish all that I have now before I lose them. Or maybe it was that one time where I was watching an infomercial about cancer patients and about 30 or so minutes into it, I began feeling ashamed of the way I took my life for granted. Everything I was worrying about that time was put into perspective, miniscule compared to the worries of the cancer patients. These were all moments that had led me to a deeper perspective and a more refined approach to life. Moments like these I distinctly remember because they’re almost like epiphanies where everything just makes perfect sense for that one second. These were thoughts that rang crystal clear in my head and were powerful enough to reshape my values. The point is, everyone will have their own experiences and develop their own approach to life. I believe we should just live and let our experiences be our teachers as opposed to figuring them out through discussions and asking each other “How should we live life?”

As I was watching Gossip Girl this week, there was a scene where Serena, a teenager, enlists out of college and leaves her home in hopes of seeking a true identity. Her mother says "Enough is enough. This need to find out who you are. Do you think anyone really knows who they are? We don't. We just live." And Serena responds by saying, "So that's it? That's your advice? To give up?" People spend their lives in search of something that can tell them "yes, this is you," trying to dig through cracks in their personality to find that one special thing that sets them apart from the rest. But at the end of the day, they'd still be as clueless as they were when they set out to "find themselves." Maybe it's just me who feels this way. Maybe I shouldn't be speaking for the population. But seriously, can anyone tell me that they're certain what "who you are" is a description of? What defines our “self” exactly? Banach states it's not our physical appearance, brain, or personalities because "in each of these cases [we are] deceiving [ourselves]." He says "I am more than just these, and no matter how hard I try to avoid it, I am free to do whatever I choose.” What does he mean by “more than just these”? I’ve always been convinced that your identity is defined by your personality. Banach obviously disagrees because he sees it as an excuse that limits the things we choose to do. He’s stating that being our personalities is self-deception. What exactly is he asking us to be then if we aren’t are brains, bodies, or personalities? If it's not any of that, then how are we supposed to define ourselves? How would we describe ourselves if we're not allowed to say we're girls, or doctors, or mothers, or someone with a perky personality?

Reading Banach’s lecture does tend to get a little frustrating though because he doesn't explicitly describe the right way to live. He tells us we are puppets by seeing "little pictures of ourselves projected by other people and we often tend to try to make ourselves into these little pictures by playing roles." He insists that everyone is leading their lives according to others expectations. He speaks condescendingly, labeling our actions as befitting to the “roles” that we play as if it was a flaw. What is so wrong in choosing to be a mother or a businesswoman? He is basically labeling all of us as posers. He believes that we let "other people determine what we are instead of deciding, ourselves, what we will be" and that "we all to some extent tend to make ourselves into the image other people have of us." How is it that he can tap into our brains and tell us how we operate our lives when he was the same person that said we live in our own "islands of subjectivity" and that no one can ever understand another person's thoughts or feelings?

Part II: Abandon Search for External Value

The meaning of life: the reoccurring record that sings us to sleep most nights. Nightly rituals where we're mentally going through the lists of things we need to do the next day... only after we rewind and go through the events that happened the day before. We wonder why we put ourselves through such grueling tasks when we’re just going to lose it all in the end. What is the point to all this? We wake up groaning, reluctant to pull our bodies out of the covers. But what do you know? Most of us eventually throw off our covers, abandon all comfort, and set out to work in hopes of finding success one day. And as most would agree, success equates to happiness. Banach believes that there is no "final resting place", no place we can happily settle in and call it success because there aren't any "external values that we can live up to, no external viewpoint from which our life can be viewed to be valuable." Since we don't have a clue to what pre-existing standards we are being held to, we should not count on finding value through the outside world. We need to capture value and happiness within ourselves and in order to do that we need to "lose all hope of external value."

Many pessimists might think that the troubles we go through in life are pitiful and not worth doing because in the end death will take all that we've achieved back. We slave all day and night only to face an inevitable loss; a loss of not only our lives but everything around us, people and possessions and all. Everything we've worked for, everyone we've encountered all poof, gone with the last beat of our hearts. No more new experiences; this is the closing chapter that ends it all. And as we listen to our books shut, we do all that we can to ignore the sound coming from the slamming of the papers laughing at how much work we've put into getting nowhere. And as that thought dawns on us, it's only fair that we agree with Banach, that "our life is a series of meaningless actions all culminating in death." I am aware that this is a reoccurring theme in my life, but I’ve begun to slide out of that state of mind. Like Sisyphus, I've found content in rolling my rock up a hill to where it would come back down and I would have to roll it back up again and again. The goal is not to find that external "final resting place," to reach a goal or to "live up to some set of pre-existing standards." The goal is to find value within yourself, to treat your experiences as chances to learn new lessons, and not as stepping stones to reach something external that you believe will establish your value. It's to live in the moment.

We think finding out "who we are" is proof of our value but like Serena's mother said, no one really knows who they are, "we just live." There is no preconceived course that we have to follow, nor any other object that exists have to follow. There is no purpose we are subjected to. Everything is cause and effect. The road is being built behind us, not something we walk on. The quest to finding out who we are is, what our purpose is, is just like that invisible final resting place Banach talks about. It's something that we don't know of and can never reach. But still, we find ourselves rolling the rock up the hill. Life may be inevitably sealed by death and I may never be able to find out who I really am but even then, I'd rather go through it enjoying everything it has to offer, challenges and all, instead of sitting by a corner for the rest of my life waiting for the end.