Once upon a time, when I used to read the names of all these great Women and Men (yes I’m a feminist) that are given in our textbooks and I used to think Wow! These Women and Men lived like a billion years ago and we still remember them. But no sir. I’m totally okay with not being remembered after I am long gone. Ah who am I kidding?
We are constantly waging a war against society by trying to prove that we are different. That we are something special. In fact, I think that if an alien comes to our planet to understand human life, we would like nothing better than our president to disdainfully wave his hands at the general population and say “These are humans” and then turn to us and say “And this is something exquisite”
But the real question is, are we really special? Or are we just like one of the stars in a galaxy? There are so many stars and we look in wonder at the cluster of them without bothering to distinguish any individually?
Okay lets work with the Cluster theory. We look at stars but they all are so different.
Some are bright,
Some are shiny,
Some are big,
Some are tiny.
(And yeah I was writing a sentence and I figured that it rhymed so I turned it into a poem) So all stars are different and applying that analogy to humans I think all humans are different too. But the stars have been there for almost forever and their differences can be noticed forever but we can’t be there forever. I think that’s what scares us the most. It’s also what makes us do the weirdest things. Such as discovering protons.
But why do we make such a fuss about being different all the time? Why talk about ‘wanting to be remembered’ in the first paragraph and then switching to ‘trying to be different’ in the second paragraph? My theory is that we try to be different because we want to be remembered. And also because English grammar rules state that to introduce two different ideas you have to make two different paragraphs.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with wanting to be remembered forever. Maybe, it’s just a byproduct of basic human instincts. We are tuned to propagate our species. This tuning has refined itself to the want of propagating our ideas as humans evolved and our brains became more complex. We want to propagate our ideas. We want to propagate ourselves. We want to continue. We want to be infinite.
We are scared that we will end up being just one of the numerous names on the graveyard slabs everyone passes by without giving a second thought to. And we like being given a second thought to. We know we will soon be forgotten. Unless you discover a proton or something (but too late it’s already been discovered). So what we do is that we try our best to be different. Because we know that being different will help us be remembered and we want the world to know and remember who we are. We don’t want to live meaningless lives which will soon be forgotten.
My conflict is how can we all be so same and yet so different?
Elastic girl: “Honey, Everyone is different.”
Her Son: “Which is another way of saying no one is.”
(Courtesy of “The Incredibles”. Not the exact dialogues but I guess they mean more or less the same)
I’ll try to explain it to myself with an example. All my friends are so different and yet so equally important. Every friend of mine has this distinguishing characteristic. This special personality. I see a little bit of myself in all of them which is why I think we understand each other so well. Because if you put all my friends together like a jigsaw puzzle they will form this big picture and that big picture is me. They complete me (Yes I did a major eye roll when I wrote that). So, if my friends are like me and I am like them, how are we different? Are we even different? Yes. Despite all the similarities, we all are very different. I think it’s the beauty of being human. We are the same species but each of us have a different genetic code, different finger print, different ideas, different thoughts, different almost everything. And yet, we understand each other because we have so much in common as well. So what I’m trying to say is that all of us are very different. We’re a bunch of difference which is different in being different.
So we all are a little jigsaw piece in someone’s life. But the problem is, some of the more ambitious of us don’t want to be just a jigsaw piece in someone’s life. We want to be THE jigsaw piece in someone’s life. Some of us don’t want to be the kind of different that only people around us understand (ungrateful little …, unfortunately, I am one of them). Because then, when we die, our legend dies when the people who know us die. And we don’t want to die. We want to be remembered like Quaid-e-Azam or Alexander the Great or Hitler. In textbooks, in history, in memories of little kids of the future. We want to be remembered forever. Like the stars. And I now notice that even when I used to think I’m okay not being remembered, it was maybe just an attempt to be different from everyone else.
So the fact of life is, even though we accept death as the ultimate destination in our lives, we still believe in immortality.
P.S Somewhere along the way, I started thinking I’m special, I deserve better and everyone owes me more than I owe them. I’m sorry that I thought all those things. Because I’m less more special than certain people around me (ooo now I'm special because I'm less special) whom I’ve managed to hurt and because I hurt people so often, I owe them WAYYY MOREE than they owe me. I’m really sorry for being such a pretentious weirdo. There is a danger that I might start doing that again and I hope that when that time comes you can kick me and forgive me.
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