The “what?”

TL; DR: A healthy balance between needs and desires constitutes an ideal target for life

As the curtains draw on a horror show year, personally, I’m somewhat glad to see the back of it. Of course, that is pretty pointless given it’s just the date on the calendar that changes but my present state in life doesn’t alter too much overnight. I wish I could say differently, but I’m unable to.

That said, the hardships and experiences this past year, have paved the way for sincere introspection and have invoked a genuine curiosity in the “why”, “what” and “how” of life. While it may not be possible to immediately ascertain what these would entail, I do think it’s possible to make an attempt to define how I’d like them to be.

I’m probably at an age where the existential questions really start looming large and the significance of it varies depending on what one may encounter in life. It looks like I’ve stuck a sweet spot with both age and experiences to drive a self inquisition. The following is a frail attempt to portray my emotions at present.

Let’s start with what we ultimately seek from life ? From my experience, there isn’t a crisp answer to this, but regardless of shape, form or sense, anything that leads to happiness is usually desirable to most. Exploring along these lines, what are the means to achieve happiness ? An easier way to answer this is to explore sources of unhappiness or misery.

Broadly speaking, individuals are miserable when their needs are not met. However, needs seem to vary from individual to individual. Or do they ?
On closer analysis, everyone has a basic set of needs that when unmet can cause misery. I term these as genuine needs or requirements in life. In it’s purest form of abstraction, these would probably boil down to just food and shelter. As a social being in a society of some form, one might also seek love and affection but it’s not totally inconceivable to me that it isn’t an absolute essential.

So what about the differing needs among individuals ? It obviously stems from the desires within. It might require a bit of getting used to, but an individual can remain happy or satisfied at the very least, with just the basic needs of life.

With that established, what should the target be ? Just meeting the basic needs in life seems to set the bar really low and in modern society, these are near certainties. So meeting the basic requirements of life, forms the lower spectrum of the “life-target” chart, if ever there was one. This was the easy part. What remains now is to establish the upper bounds.

Here on, things are blurry. What does one require to be eternally happy ? Is eternal happiness even desirable in the first place ? Well the latter is a story for another day, but it’s clear that listing what one requires to be happy is not a straightforward task. It is a vicious combination of desires, which in an ideal world would be fulfilled. Sadly, this world we live in is far from ideal and what we desire is seldom what we get. The onus is on us to choose our pursuits and bear the consequences.

For argument’s sake, let’s imagine the summit of “life-target” chart as the point where ultimate satisfaction and happiness is found. It is not clear if any mere mortal has ever attained this state. Even someone like Elon Musk, perceived to be at the zenith of the most ambitious of human endeavors, has a very well documented struggle and has publicly admitted to being unhappy and dealing with stress on several occasions.

That also raises an interesting argument. A good number of people would admit to wanting to be like Elon Musk, for instance. However, there’s a high probability that by now, Musk himself would’ve aspired for more than to be where he finds himself today. Likewise, this argument can be extended to every individual with an elevated social status. Why this is the case, is again a discussion for another day, but it’s not hard to make a firm guess in this direction.

So until we know better, the summit of the life-target chart is only accessible in an ideal world. But you can always search for the summit in the non-ideal world in that case.
What should you look for ? Most accumulated wealth ? Fame ? Impenetrable health perhaps ? The trouble is, there are just too many constituents to happiness in the non-ideal world. It all stems from our desires, as we’ve established already and while letting go of all desires from the get-go sounds like a fix, I see two problems with this

It’s practically impossible for most individuals to follow
It poses a risk to the rate of advancement of the human race

For those reasons, I believe it is important to have the desire to achieve a target in life during the formative years as it lends a sense of purpose to our very existence and this compounded over time and scale helps in the advancement of the human race itself.

For the most part, this is usually a sweet spot, somewhere between the highest attainable peak in the “life-target” chart for a non-ideal world and the base camp. As for the highest attainable peak, it’s fair to assume it implies a socially elevated status wherein others aspire to follow an individual’s example.

Well, why be any less ambitious ? Why not have the ambition to aspire to be at a socially elevated status at minimum ? That would sound like a noble idea, but raising the minimum threshold so high has it’s own complications. It requires a greater amount of effort and sacrifice towards a single prioritized pursuit. By definition, this is bound to affect other areas of one’s life. Without truly understanding the causal effects of the same, any such pursuit has a tendency to backtrack spectacularly. Furthermore, efforts and sacrifices don’t necessarily translate to success in the non-ideal world. As with most things in life, a certain degree of luck is necessary in meeting any target

Hence, this long drawn written inquisition is a mere reminder, mostly to myself, that it’s not the end of the world to not have the finish line in clear sight. The beauty of life is, you finish where you decide to finish.