Paradoxes of the Human Condition

Happiness cannot exist without suffering, joy cannot exist without pain, learning cannot exist without mistakes, success cannot exist without failure, excitement cannot exist without tedium, yet we balk and groan when we are forced to confront the latter.

It is almost a universal rule that everything in our lives, whether a certain type of food, a certain type of work, a certain type of leisure activity, a certain type of relationship or friendship, requires balance in order to optimize our mental and physical well-being, but our culture, or perhaps even our innate nature, embeds within us a desire to constantly strive for more or better, and never enough.  

Cultivation of the mind is the only pathway towards a life well lived, but we are haplessly ensnared in a perpetual conflict with the self, where our rational thoughts are often overridden by our prewired instincts and obstinate emotions.

We have all the answers to the difficult life questions, but we refuse to learn. When most of us already understand the specific factors that contribute to a truly happy and fulfilling life, we constantly sabotage ourselves, often unknowingly, and we become inured to a society whose fundamental design is counterproductive to that quest. 

The way we feel influences the way we act, just as much as the way we act influences the way we feel. What caused what? What influenced what? Where does it start? Where does it end? We can decide what we do, but that decision is almost always entirely based on how we feel. And more often than not, we can’t choose how we feel. 

Our collective prosperity as a species demands that we cooperate and establish unity, but we obstreperously antagonize, degrade, and dehumanize one another by waging brutal wars and manufacturing senseless conflicts. 

Our short-term thinking predisposes us to be hyper-aware of the present status quo and to vehemently defend it, but what actually kills us in the end is what seeks to harm us not in the present, but in the distant future. They are the truly malevolent forces within this world that will creep upon us when we least expect it—those that insidiously lurk far beneath the surface, waiting for the opportune moment to strike.

Truth is what ultimately saves us, and yet the natural course of human argument, filled with extraneous emotion, irrationality, and the obstinate desire to win, makes it artificially elusive and notoriously difficult to attain. 

We glorify the belief in our own free will, latching onto the notion that we decide our own fate, but our social nature—wired to conform and emulate the language, attitudes, beliefs, and worldview of those around us—becomes the primary obstacle to it. 

Suffering and evil are impossible to eradicate, and perhaps even undesirable for us to eradicate in its entirety, but it is often that the very pathway towards a meaningful and purposeful life is by this futile yet valiant endeavor to achieve the unachievable, to win the unwinnable, to make possible the impossible.

Human nature consists of as much a desire to be generous as it does a desire to be selfish. As much as so many of us want to help one another, to show affection, to show that we care, it seems as if we have a profound struggle juggling those desires with the voices within ourselves that want us to be self-serving and merely concerned with our own survival. 

We’ve come to a point in human history where most of our technological innovation and progress as a species can be defined as the seemingly perpetual loop of creating problems, then solving those same problems we created. 

We inherently hunger for certainty in a world that by its very nature couldn’t be more uncertain. And often in our quest for certainty, we inadvertently generate even more uncertainty. 

“But one must not think ill of the paradox, for the paradox is the passion of thought, and the thinker without the paradox is like the lover without passion: a mediocre fellow.”

―Soren Kierkegaard