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[rickbarooah]

Thinking about the future

Most of the images on my Substack are made by AI. But for this one, I, myself, made the images. I would be glad to know if you like these, or should I go back to using an AI to generate the graphics?

There is also a short story, the young and the old at the end. You know about this if you are following me on Notes. You can skip to that if you don’t wanna read all this.

Start of the article

“I am nothing but I must be everything” — Critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right, Karl Marx

I’ve been working harder than ever on my work, but there is still a decrease in the posting frequency, and that’s because I’ve also been sending articles to many newspapers and ending up with rejection emails. Don’t quit reading, now that you know this.

Now, freelancing is the only visible option, working on getting started (Making sample articles, reading and taking courses on copywriting, figuring out how all this works). At times like this, everything seems elusive.

Also trying out graphics designing, the images in this post are the outcome of that, to open the possibility of earning something that way. I’m not good at it.

I made a serious projects section on Substack to put projects that I’ve spent days working on and cover important issues. Also getting some critiques on my writings on Critique Circle.

All this is happening when the open rate of my emails is hitting an all-time low. This feels like I’m making reverse progress while working hard.

Nothing in the world matters, if we think about the universe as a whole. I don’t know if you are religious, you might think it’s a part of a big plan. I don’t believe in any of that. Truth matters to me more than self-satisfaction. But, I’m not judging you if you differ.

Thinking about absurdism lately. I’m at least not a nihilist anymore. Thinking about the novel, The Stranger by Albert Camus. In the voice of Meursault, nothing matters. It’s resonating in my life.

But that doesn’t mean I’ll give up. In the previous post, the bitter phase of life was based on it. You may read it if you want to know more (It was updated after the email was sent).

A quick recap of the part we need today: The protagonist wants to live in a place of peace, away from the chaos of the urban world. His/her dreams have changed from achieving things to having a life he/she wants.

Important conclusions for this article: (changing perspective from the protagonist to me) I don’t want to make a lot of money. just enough to change the way I live now. I want more freedom, peace, calmness.

Nothing really matters, so we can give importance to things that we think matter to us. I have an article written on this. I’ll publish it soon, by the end of next week. It might make everything feel better.

This is all good and easy to say until you factor in that you are not the only one living in this world. There are many living piles of shit around who are constantly trying to ruin your day. Getting depressed is also a thing. I have feelings that no one understands. No one listens. Maybe because of all the superficial things I do which I don’t mean to.

I act in a way I don’t want to. The problems I have are unheard of by most and can drown me down in the dark thoughts of nihilism, meaninglessness, suicide, self-doubt, self-regret, shame, etc.

There are moments where everyone is wrong but no one acknowledges it. They talk with a bias filter on top of their vocal cords.

I get mad. Sometimes people don’t see the human inside the skin and treat others like a bunch of words moulded into a moving skeleton. I don’t like seeing that happen to others. I cry when it happens to me.

Freaking doesn’t help.

When I started, all my writings could be summarised into eighteen words, “a person freaking out on the internet like a child cause he/she doesn’t have anyone to talk to.” But that has changed. Maybe not enough; you can put this post in the same category if you wish to. I made the serious projects section to list projects that can truly add value to someone’s life. That’s part of the reason why this is not there even though I spend days working on it.

The truth is: no one wants to read you freaking out. They are my problems, nobody else gives a fuck about them.

No matter how many spicks of motivation I get, seeing the dashboard brings me down on my knees in an instant.

Nothing is driving me except an internal rebellion fueled by everything around me. It’s a rebellion against the world order, pre-determined paths of success, and the conventional definition of happiness. Making money doesn’t make you happy, but you need to have some to set free and find yourself out in the world.

Every day, all I end up saying is: I’ll try, what else can I do? Yet, a question always remains at the back of my mind: What’s the use of this all? — This question may not affect the way I’m going to live life, but it has certainly, changed the way I see life forever.

Ending here.

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Something else

There are times when everyone is wrong in something, but instead of seeing that we make up our minds on who is right based on our biases. Below is a short story where an old man and a young boy are thinking while passing each other in an alley, neither is right but it’s still easy to decide who is right.

An old man walks with creases on his face, expanding and overlapping with each step. The creases expand to an extent that you can make out the shape of his face, this makes him look angry. Angry because none of those young souls can listen to what’s right.

A boy feeling no better than an ant stuck at a pond is walking in the same alley, opposite direction. Thinking of all the things that were off, cursing everyone in his mind, “There’s no use of regret once I’m a walking dead man.” He’s angry too, but there are no creases on his face.

Seeing through his thick eyelids, the man sees a spoiled kid - angry and doesn’t seem to give a fuck about him. He stops abruptly, his movements make the boy stop too. Looked into each other’s eyes for a second and moved on.

[rickbarooah]

Religion, Science, and Society

"Is man merely a mistake of God? Or God merely a mistake of man" --- Friedrich Nietzsche

They say God is listening to everything, even what's hidden deep in our minds. For me, it's a threat to privacy. If it's true, we should have lawsuits running against God, because now God is considered a legal entity (as seen in the Ayodhya case).

People believe in books that have men flying, animals talking, water turning into wine, stopping time in the middle of a war, and other absurdly illogical things.

This aside, the concept of bloodshed for the establishment of dharma is a non-humanitarian idea. Superstitions, making of untalkable topics, and people killing themselves are some examples of things happening in the name of God.

Believing in religion is a superstition. We are not getting rid of the problem of superstitions without giving up this dogmatic belief. Almost every superstition has a connection with religion in one way or another.

Religion played an important role in our past. It served as a common myth under which a large group of people could work together.

Humans, thousands of years ago were incapable of figuring out the mysteries of the world around them let alone the universe. As humans became self-conscious and started questioning abstract things like the meaning of life, they felt insecure about not finding any answers. The obvious solution, to not end up in genocide, was to make their own meaning.

They created an omnipotent, all-knowing, caring, good God. They made a God who was responsible for everything. Everything was done by him. He self-created himself. He was in charge of everything. Our purpose was to serve and thank him.

This solved a lot of problems. They got a common myth to work for, and something to rely on.

But, clearly, there are a lot of problems in this system.

How does God create himself? Why does God need us to serve him? If he was in charge of everything then he must be the evilest thing that has ever existed.

As human society and knowledge advanced, it became easy to question this system. It's now touching the point that if someone thinks about it rationally and with an open mind then he/she will eventually end up figuring out that this is all nonsense.

Religion is useless now. Nonetheless, it is a great tool to control people's minds. It can be used by fascist governments to control the population.

Government and religion are the two things that should not be together in a state. Religion and government intertwining is one of the fourteen signs of fascism among others like rampant sexism, controlled mass media, fraudulent elections, etc.

A religious environment is created in the country. The religion of the majority is shown to be in danger and the government comes like a saviour. Even though the government fails to do anything for the country, everything is forgiven in the name of God.

Religion is not needed for morality. Morality is far deeper than religion and it exists in us without religion.

Religion can influence our knowledge but you rather not have religion to be moral. There's no denying that there are a lot of questionable things in religious books. The common thing to say here is: You can keep the bad aside, and take the good.

How can anyone determine what's good and bad in religious books if they are getting their morals from those books? We don't need those books to learn what's good and bad. It's something that we all have; some are less moral and others are more. There is no reason for putting religion between this.

You can find some decent paragraphs in religious books but there is more bad than good in those books. Religious texts have many terrifying stories that are better off not being told to children. Saying to a child that he/she will be going to hell after death if they don’t follow some set of rules, is evil.

People too afraid of change end up in a situation where they are holding onto two completely different belief systems. A religious person who accepts the Darwinian theory of evolution is suffering through cognitive dissonance.

You need to have meaning in your life, and religion gives you that.

Maybe. People who don't want to go through the trouble of making their own meaning in life end up saying this.

There is no meaning in the logical approach to life. We need to create our own meanings. Religion can give some sort of meaning to someone's life. If someone doesn't want to make their own meaning then they can take the meaning given by religion, which is rather oppressive.

Religion is not the only way to find meaning in life. It's also a made-up meaning. And it's not the best meaning to believe in.

It's time to move on from religion.

References

1. Mahabharat

2. Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

3. Fascism anyone? by Laurence W. Britt

[rickbarooah]

The bitter phase of life

[This is a work of fiction trying to describe the life of a sad person]

I like to live in daydreams where I’ve mastered everything, and now I can’t escape. Yet, there are nights which pass by thinking about my present. I decided to write it down and this is what I ended up with.

I don’t care about anyone. I thought I was heedless, but nonetheless, I also managed to convince myself that nobody cared about me either. Security wasn’t a known feeling; all I see in everyone’s eyes is judging, judging me for the way I am. ‘I’ve never judged anyone.’ – a lie I like to tell myself every time my brain shows me the faces of everyone on the streets whose eyes happened to look at me while I walked past them.

The nights are good, they always come but the days never disappear. I wish I could skip to a time when I would have the money to stop working and make days turn into nights.

I was in my thoughts, asking myself too many times, “Is it worth staying around?” I wake up every day at the buzz of the alarm when I’m too sleepy to distinguish between my eyes opened and closed. This was autumn. The mornings are filled with dust, waiting outside to get in my nostrils and kick start the sinus headaches. I hate this, but the summer wasn’t great either.

It’s October. I remember myself on the same day last year – feeling, asking, thinking the same things. Yet, today felt even worse.

People go through struggles magnitudes higher than mine. The bad thoughts and fantasies inside my head are a reality for some.

I got myself thinking about suicide again:

People suicide, but are they the ones to go through the worst pains? They may not have been through some of the worst human pains. They have been through pain out of their limits. No matter how bad it seems to say, jumping off the top of a building is a solution to someone’s problems.

Being young, having no hopes for the future, and going through an existential crisis sucks. Not having any idea of how bad something can be sucks. Not knowing what a heartbreak could feel like sucks. Not knowing the depths of pain sucks

I know, I’ll have to go through the first time for anything new I decide to do. The first time is the time that hurts (or the opposite) the most.

Lying in bed and thinking today is the all-time low of my life every night, doesn’t make a lot of sense. But certainly, it’s true. If you haven’t experienced your all-time low through some sudden trauma, this would (probably) happen. Remembering this as a single point in your life is easy, going through it is hard. I have notes I made a year ago going through these feelings, but it seemed better than today, which might very well not be true.

“Every new day is my all-time low” – said to myself which left an impression in the emptiness of the night. I’m thinking without words, seeing the patterns on the ceiling, that got dirty as a result of not being cleaned for years.

---

Thinking stopped and I snapped right back into the reality. It was morning, I didn’t notice it till now. I need to get out of bed. I lost weight and I was still going to skip breakfast. The sun’s rays hit my eyes reflecting off the leaves which refused to move. There was almost no wind, yet if I go out I’ll have a few dust particles hitting my face. There was judgment in the air. The wind would want to say something but then turn back thinking I would judge. I was too afraid of judgment.

I went out. The barely blowing wind felt nice, it made me lose sense of where I was. I found myself in the middle of the road, a bike driver was losing himself blowing the horn, and it passed just a few inches short of hitting me and making the next few days a mess. The driver was calling me crazy as he was passing by, but my heart didn’t even rise a little. I grew colder with my feelings. I didn’t talk to anyone that they.

Now I was going through the sidewalks. That incident made me take a safer way. The sky was covered with broken clouds which reminded me of my past childish dreams:I saw the smithereened sky I took my fragment I want to look through it But gave up before taking a glance Now, I can find pieces to reconstruct But I know myself: I’m not even gonna try The other was saying to me: “It got shattered in the past Better not be thought of in the present” There was a time when I could have saved it It was falling in front of my eyes My dreams were falling It was getting harder to sleep every night “Better let it go” – he said And I let it become unrecognisable pieces Now they are no longer what I want And the world knew none of my mind I kept them a secret ‘cause I dreamed of something that could not be shared I wanted peace and it can never fall

I wasn’t ready for the misery of the world, so I made my life miserable. I know it’s not a good life to live, nor a good life to die with.  But I’ll have an interesting story to be told if I die today. The only problem is, nobody knows what it is, and nobody ever will. What’s that story? Better leave it to never be discovered.

--End of the article. READ MORE ON MY WEBSITE.

This article doesn’t promote suicide and my intentions are not to encourage any of that.