To burden oneself with knowledge
Ignorance is bliss
2020 hasn’t even found its footing yet, but the past couple of days seem like the worst of the past decade packaged into one month. Iran and America decided to engage in a conflict that promulgated the idea of another World War. Climate Change is still looked like a subject in which debate about its veracity has to be continued aimlessly. The Indian government still doesn’t budge from the castle of sand it sits upon, the flimsy foundation still holding somehow despite forces from the country amalgamating against it. From where the Amazon stopped burning, the Australian infernal vortex has already functionally impaired a depressingly uncountable species.
From the tip of my finger, I can easily count all the misfortune events occurring around the world, but for the love of God, I have no idea what the good news is. I tried to think but failed miserably. The good news doesn’t sell; the bad news is hotcakes. What does a person do when s/he has been subject to one position of crisis to another?
The solution to almost all problems is simple, don’t think about them. As easy as one, two, three!
Solipsism is a branch of philosophy that concerns itself with the self as the only thing which matters, while the rest of the world doesn’t exist. Certainly not very intuitive, but think of your mind being trapped in a cage where whatever you perceive is just what your mind wants you to believe. As a writer, I imagine that people are reading this, and then they discuss it with me. My existence is just my experience, and whatever the other mental states are, which belong to other people, they are a subset of my mental state.
TLDR? Nothing’s real.
So back to our root problem. If one can somehow manage to totally and completely avoid thinking about any calamity or adversity, one can deny the existence of them. It merely and unequivocally ceases to exist. Ignorance is bliss.
But things don’t work like that. Pain exists to let your body know that there is something wrong so you can identify it and take appropriate measures before it causes long term issues. The putrid smell of house gas warns one of an impending explosion. The big cracks on the wall hint at the possibility of a collapse
While this is purely anecdotal but when I arrived in London where every corner and street absconds with your money using whatever it can, I purchased a travelcard which hardly came of any use to me. I subsequently got scolded by a lot of housemates. “You should have asked me first about this! (I just met this person five minutes ago but alright). Do this! Do that! etc. etc.”
It made a massive difference in the quality of life when I learned all the things I should know about living here, and everything is so much easier than before instead of being ripped off.
Is my narrative even equivalent to the global crises mentioned before? Not even close. But I would allude to them as being two different fruits on the same branch. While the problems in magnitude and designation are wholly different, one set of questions got solved by having the right amount of knowledge.
I get my news from Reddit. It’s easy to browse, digestible enough to get through, and the comments in the thread give me a sample (albeit skewed) of what the general public opines. It’s becoming a chore to browse the website, though and numbing to hear one disaster after another, which doesn’t even remotely pertain to my issues. But hiding away doesn’t help, never helped, and will never help. The don’t-care-attitude applies to only selected areas and aspects of life. Adopting it in every facet leads to past misery being piled upon present misery until a point where the future misery becomes a Herculean task to overcome and maybe cannot be solved in some cases.
I don’t know how to finish this off, so I will correct a small error I made in the second paragraph. There is a positive thing which I have observed; there are more people coming together to fight against problems plaguing us. The tyranny of certain groups is being tolerated no more. The neutrals, the ones who don’t add anything, are now being berated for once. The newer generation is much more proactive than what we could have been. Solutions are being brought up to varying degrees of success. And to sum it up, there is a light shining brightly overhead.
Then it hit me that it may not be enough, and everything became bleak again.
