Published: December 23, 2025
Hello my mortal friend, welcome to the world of self-deceit. When you really need to get something done, sometimes you say, I am doing this for my parents, for my children, for my descendants, or maybe for humanity. I have some bittersweet news -We are egocentric beings at the core. It's a survival instinct for one to care for their well-being. Some people even go as far as taking a life to spare their own. This is even justified in the court of law in the form of self defense.
Let's shift to a different dimension, shall we? Your father is a wealthy man but some of his activities of acquiring land to establish an industry of the future displaced me and my family. I come to you, enraged, a penknife in my right hand, threatening to skin you alive if you don't get your father to relinquish our land. I don't actually plan on doing it, but only I know this. I brandish my knife at you, all your nerves scream only one thing "This is a merchant of death, I must survive!". You want to protect your own life at all costs. Little do I know that you own a gun, and not just for show.You pull the trigger. It's a mortal wound and I can feel myself losing grasp of this world. You just realize, "I killed a human!". Despite you owning a gun you had never actually used it. Your father being one of the richest men in the world had offered you one for "protection". You observe a moment of silence, not for the dead but because the amount of data being fed into your brain in form of emotions is too much to handle. Finally your senses are coming back. You scream, "What have I done?".
In my last moments as my life flashes before my eyes, I am enlightened, I come to a realization that it wasn't your fault. It is just natural survival instinct for one to care for their life over others. I call it selfishness. We practice the sin of taking from others to satisfy our own needs. We take away money from both the rich and the poor alike, innocence from both the weak and the strong, life from both the unsuspecting and those who threaten our survival. Sometimes we are so despicable that we even do it out of greed. It is the reason why we wage war on others, sometimes not even to save our own lives but to secure resources that will be necessary for us to have a better life. We lay waste to years of hard-work of fellow humans, giving one reason or another on why we are doing it. A reason that sounds reasonable to other humans. After all, we want to justify our actions. This death will be no different than how man brings down his knife on a goat to secure nutrients for his survival. It's just the natural order of things. I was never the alpha male, not even a beta, just fodder to aid in the great survival of human kind. It seems like lady destiny dealt me the worst cards. In my next life perhaps I will not be as temperamental and will lean toward dialogue."Don't be sad my friend, it wasn't your fault. It was you survival instinct. It's both a beauty and an ugliness of mankind". I mutter my last words to you thinking that it will make you feel better.
Despite my enlightenment about the egocentric nature of humans, I know that as a species we have the ability to make choices. Choices not as simple as 'if statements' in a computer program but choices that can go against the very nature of our being! That is why, my mortal friend, even after you pulled the trigger out of the need for survival, you still had a flux of emotions into you and you knew then, that what you had done was not your best course of action. After all, what we value most after own life are the lives of fellow humans. It's not just the selfishness we have in us but the compassion too. As I fade into a deep dreamless slumber, I say to myself. "Sometimes only in death do you realize what could have been". My mortal friend, I pray that you realize what could have been before that scythe comes down on your neck.
I have come to realize that the gap between what you might consider negative feelings and positive feelings is quite slim. Hate can be born out of love and without sadness we would probably not appreciate the importance of happiness. Let's talk about hope. A positive feeling indeed, and one that is at the core of every human being. It's a cornerstone for our survival. One might even go so far as to state that it is coded into our genes. Without it our person or what some might call the soul would be dead. We have the capacity to reason and therefore we dream of a better tomorrow. What do you think would happen if you knew that your tomorrow would be bleak? I guess you would have nothing to look forward to. You would search for whatever vermin was making you see a bleak future and try to crush it. Find a way to see some light at the end of the tunnel.That blank canvas, that is the future, you dream of filling it with beautiful portraits. You dream and hope that one day you will achieve your desires, may they be evil or good.
Maybe it is to become financially independent as many dream of nowadays. After all, the word of honey has become the world of money. You dream that one day you will get married to a beautiful wife who has been meticulously created to the last hair on her and maybe have cute little kids who grow up to be outstanding citizens. Maybe your dream is to travel all over the world or even the universe and literally leave your footprints on every corner. Perhaps it's to create a better world for humanity. Whatever it is, that grande dream that you hold on to is glued together by hope.
The fact that even hope exists beyond our graves perplexes me. Almost all, if not all religions that exist on earth have some concept of an afterlife. Whether it's hell or heaven, or maybe it's reincarnation. Humanity's fear bred hope in the form of afterlife. It's not bad anyway, after all without hope we are nothing. When we fail, we hope that we'll get another chance. If there was a Guinness word record of the most pessimistic human alive, it would be a charade.They'd be dead. It's even written in the holy books, when a door closes another one opens. Isn't that the general idea. If the said alternative door doesn't open we look elsewhere, after all, hope must be kept. It drives us. We hope even in death!
The complexity of emotions perplexes me. They seem to define our every move in life as if it were a chess game. You sacrifice a pawn to protect the King in a Chess game. How different do you think real life is, or isn't? Would you sacrifice a life to save another based on the value of the life? But then again who decides that a life is more valuable than another? In a game of chess, given the choice to lose a pawn or a rook for example, it would be logical to let go of the pawn. Within the pawn, however lied the potential to be Queen one day, however slim the chances. Do emotions vary logic itself, or do emotions just make us ignore logic. Or is it that the state of logic itself is not constant and adding a certain reagent to the reaction changes the state of logic itself?
I have always stated that all emotions are pivotal to our survival including the negative ones. You wouldn’t be able to realize that you need to take your hand of the fire if there wasn't any pain. If you have watched superhero movies you would bear witness that many of them have sad and tragic backgrounds. And the villains, they do too. When you are sad, angry or perhaps full of regret you come up with ideas, ideas of avoiding similar situations. One would even state that these negative emotions are the driving force behind humanity. If you are dissatisfied you try to work towards a state in which you are satisfied. However, if you are happy you will try to maintain the state of things by doing. well, nothing. Because of the fear that adding a reagent to this reaction will lead to unknown outcomes. Humans have been and will always be afraid of the unknown. The mysteries of the universe such as death scare us to, well, death.