The fortifying nature of my conscience is killing me from inside and there’s nothing that I can do about it. How do I not succumb to the pressure of being scathed with pain and misery when I try not to turn myself into someone I’m not? There’s no way to find out. For me, atleast, at the end of the tunnel, there’s no light - only shadows. No way to tell if this is all a lie - the way the universe probably intended.

Everything that ever happened in the history of the world has been coincidences and chances against the race of time. You and I wouldn't be here if a leaf moved the wrong way millions of years ago, the ancestor tripped while being chased by the mammoth, or a bad combination of gases ended up in the atmosphere when it formed.

The fact is that when your parents met to give birth to you, it had its odds stacked out against millions of other possibilities - now imagine that on a much larger scale. About 8 billion large. Now winning the sperm lottery against the odds of incopulation, condom, abortion, or the competition between hundreds of thousands of similar microscopic entities doesn’t seem so special anymore. Winning the sperm race no longer felt like an accomplishment of lottery, but more of an extension to the race in a bigger body - against others who reached here before, after and right when you did. 

Seldom, the race isn’t even fair - some are born to the wrong people, financially weak, a geographically suppressive nation, or physically/mentally deformed. Add to that, the modern inventions that are designed to prey on the weak and vulnerable, bombarding us with the hopes and dreams of utopia, and advertisements that promise fulfilment in over-glorified toilet cleaners, which, coincidentally, telecast when having lunch. 

Wearing coloured wigs and joker masks, walking around the suburban city unemployed with no space to sleep - or lying in the wells of a dry wasteland with families so malnourished that their skeleton is popping out. If you, like me, have had the privilege to relate to only a small amount of this, need to take the hard pill that we lucked out. Things could’ve gone way down south, down to the depths of despair, misery, and a whole lot of traumatic expeditions that we wouldn’t be able to comprehend. 

But that doesn’t take the spotlight from the bigger arc of the human-life-bell-curve. Much of the human population in this arc, at least in a smaller dataset, has the averagest of life-experiences. Most of us will start out at life the same way as everyone else did, with a tinge of our unique circumstances sprinkled in that make us different in our own ways. These, early in life, are mostly out of our control, like, the place of birth, the colour of our skin, the choice of parents, or the place they decide to spend our childhood in. We don’t have any say in any of it, and for better or worse, there are things inherited from our immediate ancestors that can never be naturally changed [Good luck dealing with diabetes at the age of three].

Some cases are unusually extreme, which more often than not, I suppose, fall into this category. If you don’t have any siblings, you are unfortunately the only hope for any sort of salvation in your toxic and anxiety-driven household even before you are five. And that’s a huge load to an ex-foetus who was pulled out of the womb to face reality. 

But these common life experiences begin to diverge into what I like to call the similar-but-different-enough-to-feel-like-it's-never-happened-to-anyone-but-me category after a certain threshold point.

As milk stops coming in baby bottles and it is expected to learn maths without numbers - a kid lives differently from others. Still, there is a common pattern in this variation, mainly due to decisions taken, or most times, just plain luck. A few unlucky results in exams might have labelled a kid as a “bad” student, making him believe for the rest of his life that he is dumb; maybe a teacher showing special attention to him - a halo effect changing the way he is forever; leaving the toilet seat open causing a butterfly effect that prevents him from meeting his soulmate - because “leaving toilet seats open” is her ick and when they would meet, it’s already wired into his nervous system. 

These variations can sometimes be amplified by unexpected circumstances thrown into the chaos of life - drastically changing without any prior arrangements, like, accidents or tragedy - which happen in one’s life like a piece of domino pushing over everything before it is supposed to. Sudden curveballs that the universe throws. Like a fifteen year old feeling sick and finding out he has cancer, or a parent passing away leaving behind heavy doses of regret, or a guy jailed leaving his wife and kids behind who will grow up without a father figure - worse - those kids discovering what Valorant is. 

These triggers, stress and impulsive actions that happen after being thrown into the dark pit of chaos and sadness, aimed at coping from the same, instead ruin things further. In psychology, it is called a negative feedback loop. But what’s worse, is that they impact the life of people around them more than themselves. An event that triggers depression, trauma, or a pessimistic approach to life that could take years to heal, slows a person down from living stably. For example, turning the person an easy victim of bullying, which could make them inept to social interaction without anxiety or putting up a defence. It could impact work, lowering productivity and affecting every individual there negatively. Their partner unintentionally becoming a cushion to their outbursts and tantrums which takes the partner’s life too on a downward spiral, prompting them to either ruin themselves, leave, or cheat, which fuels the negative feedback loop all over like a chain reaction, affecting more and more people around the one that’s always sad.

From an evolutionary point-of-view, sadness played an important role in reassessing our survival tactics and to find comfort in safe spaces. Sadness would be profound in this game of life - if it didn’t suck ass. Although one could go in a rabbit hole romanticising a cynical and nihilistic approach to living, and resorting to thinking sadness and isolation is the only way to experience life in this environment  - which isn’t a fun way to live. But just because we were born in a pretty affluent generation, with the most advanced access to healthcare and education, doesn’t mean we don’t get to be sad. There is a huge need for social and sexual validation rampant in us, which makes sense, because they are one of the most important traits of evolution. But unbeknownst to the brain, social hierarchy and its functions have changed from the days we used to carve stones and kingdoms, to becoming more of a numbers game. 

First type of number: the one with the most likes and comments, aka, social hierarchy and importance decided upon internet fame and its metrics. Higher ratio of likes, comments or hearts in DM’s “wins” the mental game of being validated from a social point-of-view, all from being far from it. Sure, having seventeen people message you random memes and poop emoji seems like you have seventeen friends. But how many of those would actually visit you after you have a colonoscopy? Five? Four? I don’t know, you tell. Now you don’t really have to be happy with the people you love, but rather “show” that you are happy to the people you barely know and mostly hate. Behind the aesthetic photos of mirror reflections and expensive paper coffee cups, there is us - a human, homo sapien - that isn’t aware of all that beyond the six inch smartphone, which  opened the pandora's box - of an imagined reality where all that glitters is gold - where - everything is the easiest, most fun, intuitive, one-click-away thing ever. 

I know it better than anyone.

The other kind of number dominating the current human civilization is money [and status] - the amount of cars you own, houses, or your net worth - things that stop mattering the moment you take your last breath. A person with “high status” is more likely to meet and mate with other people. With government jobs and BMW’s becoming a necessity for marriage in modern society, we are headed to a super-saturated market where a hyper competitive culture for basic living needs is becoming common. I know I threw a bunch of jargon there. I thought it might sound cool. Sue me.

The third, and the most prominent, but in my opinion, most baffling use of numbers in current society is the use of identification card numbers/social security numbers. There is something about labelling a person with a set of unique digits with no meaning but just making it easier to store in a virtual database. The holocaust had the Nazis giving the Jewish prisoners a “tag” or number, stripping them of their names, dehumanising them - telling them they didn’t matter - which is one of the most cruel things to psychologically happen to someone: not to be hated, but to be treated as non-existent. But it is reality now. Certificates and Papers with IDs and roll numbers on spreadsheets literally decide if you exist or not. And those, in turn, also decide the way your life is led. Unless you have a “valid” birth certificate, there is no way to prove legally that you are alive even if you show up to the court as a living, breathing person (please do not fact check). But it is sort of the only solution for managing millions of people in a civilization, with labels, tags, and spreadsheets - digital unique identifiers to keep the count up. 

No longer are smaller clans or villages of human settlements where social dynamics, gossiping, and weekly dance around fire camps where one worships the rain - and everyone knows everyone else with their sole existence being to contribute to the well-being of the community -  is still a thing.

As the current society is striving towards automation and convenience, where everything needs to be done, delivered, and experienced immediately, one needs to think if it is all even needed. Maybe lunch breaks in government banks are a necessary evil in this modernization of society, letting that sink in. 

But, let’s just zoom out a bit. Maybe more. There. Look. Yes. That’s right, from third person, we are measly microbes moving around like noise on a planet that seems to be plugged with wires. There is also no economic inflation here - or the stock market.

Zoom out more, and we see Jupiter.

Huge, orange and beautiful, which are also my three favourite things ever. Jupiter’s volume is about one thousand three hundred times earth, and most of it is just gas with extremely high levels of gravity. It is also the home for the biggest storm in the solar system: a giant red spot - magnificently hypnotising that I’d want to fall into that even if it’s the last thing I see. The planet is so big - that even when it is very far away from earth, it is still visible to the naked eye. A yellowish-orange tint - a dot - behind the vast blackness of the northern hemisphere. Alone. Brimming with dangerous gases.

But not too far away from Jupiter in the earth's sky, there’s the Orion belt - three cosmic entities making up a star system, a supergiant, and a binary star - Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka. Part of the roman constellation the Orion. Their distance from earth each ranging from 1200 to 2000 light years and sizes that are multiple magnitudes higher that the sun. Yet, when viewed from the Earth’s clear night sky, it appears in a perfect straight line - pointing towards Sirius.

It's as if the belt is saying “Look! that’s the brightest star in the night sky.” A stellar symphony composed by the wonders of the universe - something that would never come close to anything capable by the futile efforts of humanity. What are the possibilities of this illusion? And for Earth to be in this spot - at this moment - so this is possible. I’m born too late to discover classical physics or business theory, but I’m still early before one of the three stars undergoes a supernova and disappears forever, erasing this beauty that I’m too dumbfounded to even express in words.

We are mere mortals in the sizes of atoms compared to the vast scales of the night sky and everything it has got - planets, stars, black holes and galaxies far, far, away. I know I’m wasting my bare-minimum knowledge of constellations here instead of using it to impress a girl I’m interested in - but it is so scary - terrifying. Space is so lonely and that sometimes I forget we are the only planet capable of what we call “life”, “civilization” and “society” - at least in a radius of multiple thousand light years. But against the cruel nature of space, asteroids that are huge enough to cease our existence in seconds, space weather storms big enough to beat the defences of our atmosphere, and our own sun being a ticking time bomb waiting to swallow us whole in five billion years, really raises the question: IS THIS ALL WORTH IT?

I mean, we’re a bunch of nobodies in a planet that no one knows why it exists, in a galaxy no one looked into fully, in an universe no one will ever be able to comprehend - and despite our puny little problems being so insignificant, the chemicals in our body and mind convincing us otherwise, making it seem like it’s the worst thing ever.