This whole year (and last) has felt like waking up on the wrong side of the bed. To think that at the beginning I had resolutions and hopes for myself was ambitious to say the least in hindsight. I've lost and found a lot of new people; some of the losses had to happen, others just did.
Above all, it’s dawned on me more than ever how much we are at the mercy of powers beyond our control. Much akin to how the limbs of a weathered tree are subject to bending and swaying haphazardly in whichever way the wind blows, the fragility of our illusory free will had become much more apparent with each passing hardship.
In Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, she attempts to both destigmatize and deromanticize illness as a scientific reality latent within all of us, opening with a striking statement: “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place”. If some illnesses are fated in genetics, preventative healthy living may seem counterintuitive. Why spend your whole life abstaining from alcohol, maintaining a healthy and steady diet, if it ultimately does not help ward away the unavoidable? Extrapolating further, if you knew a tragic ending was inevitable, would you still pursue the journey nonetheless? This can really be applicable to anything - career, love, health - and given enough mind, it becomes quite a harrowing thought.
Assessing how any amount of power is handled can be used as a heuristic to evaluate character. This could be applied in many contexts, and to varying degrees. Examples could include how a people-manager operates in a work environment (do you push around your subordinates just because you can?), or in dating (do you make someone carry an undue and unequal share of pursuit, effort or financial burden, knowing their romantic feelings will persist nonetheless?). Most of the time when we discuss abuses of power, we think of corrupt politicians, lawmakers or bigwig CEOs in multinational corporations who shield themselves from consequence with money and connections. Most of us can't relate on that level, but that's mostly because we haven't been given the opportunity to. How a person navigates small-scale systems of power and imbalanced dynamics is the closest we can infer whether the same would hold true in a grander context. If you can get away with abusing power without any consequences, would you do so?
What these two themes ultimately tie back to is a broader overarching question. If you knew you wouldn't face any reward or consequence from your actions, and your actions won't change any inevitable outcome, would you do anything differently?
It is easy to conclude (but perhaps harder in practice) that acting with respect, dignity and integrity shouldn't be based on a system of rewards or incentives/disincentives. Especially since the universe does not tether rewards to positive actions or consequence to negative actions as karma or religion would conveniently offer. As the concept of the ‘original position’ would suggest, in a vacuum, free from contextual prescription, we can think of respect and dignity as basic bare minimums we owe to others as existential rights. Or more simply, we can think of this as abiding by the elementary principle of the ‘golden rule’. If it can be applied that we have an imperative to do right by others, similarly it can be said that we owe it to ourselves to respect our body and mind.
So what if it is inevitable that you will suffer or become ill one day? Or if you are let go at your job despite your devotion or ability? Or if your friends or family turn their backs on you when you had theirs? Does it make it pointless to pursue doing right by others or yourself, if what you receive in return is often detached from anything within your control? What if aspiring to be an optimal version of yourself, and to do good by others are virtues as desirable ends within themselves?
Growing up (and even now to some extent), I’ve often scoffed at the traditional belief of 'suffering as a virtue'. We’re often told to 吃苦; Endure hardships first, reap rewards later. When the guarantee of a reward is uncertain, the risk becomes unreasonable to take on. To decouple from the idea of an unguaranteed reward is to find fulfilment in navigating life through calculated risk, to roll the dice and bear the outcome (good or bad), all in the name of experiencing the journey the way it was meant to be experienced. We take in all that our common humanity has to offer, releasing ourselves from artificial guardrails which ineffectively hinder undesirable outcomes while simultaneously diluting what it means to exist and has meant to exist since the dawn of time. Expectation strips us of our humanity when we become fixated on the ends as linear outcomes of our means, leaving no room to err, an oversimplification of how reality transpires.
While it is daunting at times to keep a positive outlook on life and on myself, ultimately I've come to realize that I owe it to all the good in the world to give this life a fair shot, despite the lack of certainty of where actions and decisions may lead. Once we start to believe our actions don't matter because they don't change any inevitable outcome, it becomes easy to spiral into a nihilistic thought and self-destruction. It becomes easy to slip into despair because the world already provides us an endless amount to despair upon. Ultimately we must believe our actions have intrinsic value, despite the cruelty of injustice as a byproduct of an existence unruled by moral structure, a vast hollowness of which the reverberation of its echoes we are powerless to avoid. To will order into existence through our actions, as if it is categorically imperative to do so, perhaps may be the only way the arduous journey would be fruitful.
