Life Feels Dull in Comparison
When I read things on the internet, similar to my last short blog on Long Walks, they always provide me a familiar sense of comfort. Such reads help me slow down and I am able to spend some time with the writer in my calm imagination. They excite me to give these things a try in my life too.
...
But doing them in real life often feels ”just - normal”. They are not that dramatically happy activities or fun things as I expected them to be. I am not happy doing them. The emotions evoked by my imagination while reading are not fully translated into the actual life. It is not the fault of the writer and I am not blaming my brain for creating such imagery while reading either. I think the puzzle to be solved is our expectations about things.
We have wrong notions and weirdly mixed expectations about life. We have been raised on a constant stream of unfiltered and unrestrained media that has drilled into our minds the romanticized, happiness-oriented, and lived happily ever after kind of life. It has made us believe that when you are working on some project or doing something you love, there will be uplifting music in the background and the work will somehow finish as the song comes to an end. We are fooled into believing that when you pursue your purpose in life, you somehow happen to know everything that you need to do, face no real uncertainty and emove swiftly toward your goal.
So when you read about or watch people undertake some adventure, the expectations that you create are usually in stark contrast with reality. You do go on a long walk but there is constant noise of cars, the sun is too hot or it is too windy, you move so slow, covering no distance and there is no music in the background to uplift you. The whole way you try to convince yourself that you are feeling exactly like that short video you saw or the article you read the other day. You try to act like that guy. You try talking to strangers, but they don't want to be bothered. You visit a cafe, but now you regret buying that expensive latte. You try focusing on trees, but you cannot make something of them.
We have been so disconnected from the life we are living that it is difficult to explain this disconnect to someone. People now don't have the concept of living life without external noise. They have been so conditioned to accept the external input constantly all the time about every aspect of their life that very few have any original thought or real memory of actual experience. Whereas the generation before us used real life experiences to compare a present situation, we relate almost everything happening in our lives to memes as we lack enough real and relatable life experiences.
We will need awareness about each and every moment of life to escape from these delusions. We need to be vigilant about our fantasies and expectations that we create about future. We will also need to break ourselves free of the consumption of the media and start exploring for real so that our minds can have genuine memory for future to base its imaginations instead of depending upon unrealistic brainwashing.
Only then will we realise that when we are doing life, it is usually quiet, vague, fearful, dull and crawling forward.