Sunday, February 8, 2009

Why Care?

He looked dazed. Maybe he was thinking. Or was he day dreaming? One couldn't tell by looking at him. He just sat there with a sloppy grin on his face, and looked at the people who passed him. Only he would know what was going on in his mind. So I moved on.

*****

I looked at him. He stared at me wondering what I was doing. Thats when I realized I had a stupid smirk on my face. Before I could wipe it off, he had walked on. I had been too deep in thought to worry about my face.
Why care so much? The world around is a mess. The people are a mess. They think too much of themselves (me included). You take time to cultivate a bond, a friendship, and you get blown off at any opportune moment. You strive hard to attain the impossible, and the impossible moves on, leaving you with outdated goals. Update your goals, and you move too fast, don't, and you go extinct. People live nomadic existences. Where you are isn't as important as who you are, or what you do. We move from one lush pasture to another. Degrading everything as we go. A line from the movie Matrix, comes to mind, but its been too often thought about, and will not be quoted here. Greed is rampant. Its every being for themselves. Selfishness seems to be the way of the world.

In such a world, why care? Cut the throat of the competition and get ahead. Make your own mark. Ignore everyone. Ignore everything. Its me and I time. Say it. "Why do I deserve it? Why not him? Or her?"

But then, is this how we work? No. Its one big intertwined mess. A tangle of threads that the sisters of fate have made a mess of. The tapestry that is us, started out well, and then went from patchwork to just a knotted mass of twine.

So, again. Why care so much? Is it just our nature. Is our "evolved" brain doing this for some benefit, or it some outdated characteristic of ours that forgot to go the way of our appendix?
It was a complex thought process. And I wondered, why DID I care? What chemical imbalance did I have that others didn't have to suffer through. They could move on untouched, and unharmed, while I just had to stop and think.

2 comments:

Ujjwal said...

The manner in which the world rewards us and the way in which the mind rewards itself (feels satisfied etc) are often times at odds. Some worldly acts which might not be ideally considered 'all saintly' are necessary for survival (as you said, to prevent extinction) and to attain mental peace in the longer run (money, family etc). But again, the world promotes the devil within us for sure...and yes, you should care. Don't turn in to a devil on most occasions (once is a while, its almost inevitable for mental balance).

Peace.

backBencher said...

Best solutions result when people think about themselves *AND* other parties involved
- Interpretation from John Nash's equilibrium theory.
So maybe we care for others because we care for ourselves?