Existentialism

Retshi

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Retshi

I want an amazing life, no compromises because when Retshi died I promised things to myself and my life. Yea, I know what they say about promises and how keeping them is difficult but this was more of a vision of my life. It was subjective and heartfelt; I promised to be the best I could for him. I am more afraid of not living than dying, to be a carbon copy of everyone else and not understand what constitutes my essence, to be a slave of my impulses and not being able to regulate my emotions, to stand idle while my dreams disappear in the distance, to lose myself, to get swayed by novelty and not have an anchor that grounds me – that scares me, dying is easy and quicker. He lived a short life, he deserved more, his passing was tragic, he was a junior and he beamed with excitement at the prospect of being a senior, life had other plans and his life disappeared like an illusion, like mirrors, like it never happened. One moment he was there and the next he was gone like evaporation. Such is life, it’s all this big theatricality that disappears right before your eyes and metastasizes as something else if reincarnation is the correct hypothesis. The pictures he left behind became myths and his whole life mythological but at least he left a legend. Do his past friends and family members still remember him? Who cares? It’s like the past swallowed him into oblivion and irrelevance but I remember, I can’t quite forget about him like the feeling of nostalgia, he takes me back to simpler times. His death was honorable and respectful, he was loved, he metastasized into a hero, a noble soul and an inspiration to all, like Batman he became a symbol that transcended everyday living. You need to be deadman to be a hero and the successor to your deed needs to be alive, if both of you are still living then that’s just normal everyday living but you do have heroic characteristics. If everyone is dead, it becomes a massacre or to avoid hyperbole a draw. He fits the description of what it is to be a hero.

One nightmarish day, he jumped into the river in attempts to rescue a boy who was swallowed in the deep end, drowning, gasping for air with water flooding his body and his senses failing him. The little boy was doomed with no saviors to watch you from the bay, no Pamela Anderson with her volaptious titties to save the day, it was a swim in the river the little boy would dread. He must have saw the white light and angels singing choruses. Out of nowhere, like he was Godsent, Retshi jumped in and saved a drowning soul on the steps of heaven from perishing but he drowned and died instead. The biggest sacrifice one can make. “Damn! Just like that? He lives, and he dies? That’s not fair!” I realize my protests are futile, I just wish he didn’t jump in because then we’d still have him. I know my reasoning is selfish, spiteful, arrogant and doesn’t take into consideration the person he was even at a young age, but morality is suspended from my reasoning and discourse, I am not perfect, I am flawed, unworthy, a sinner and maybe I hate him for being the reason that my friend is gone. Yes of course, I know, Retshi is going to save some drowning kid his never met before because he was considered a good swimmer, he was tall, had a good heart and empathy of the highest order. There’s solace in that his death was ordained by the God’s, he did what came naturally to him, he didn’t have to think twice and today someone reaps the fruits of that decision. There’s also the fact that he loved swimming and so he was killed with his own dagger, the irony, poetic justice. I can’t blame him or be rueful of the past because I too appreciated the qualities he had as a human being. He had a pure soul, he loved to help, was empathic, a good listener, calm and just chilled – he was my best friend. Although I wish he hadn’t acted, I understand and I respect him even more.

When he died, I cried and mourned his life. Before his death, we had a fight and didn’t talk to each other for a week and now he was gone. It was a stupid fight that holds no weight but pride prevented us from squashing the beef and now that fight is the last memory I have of him. Just like that my friend of many years, who lived on the same street died, it was serious, it was fatal and nobody could ressurect him. It was over and I was never going to see him again, it crushed my spirit and heaven couldn’t provide consolations. When he died, I wanted to achieve great things for him, to let the world know that he was still here operating in the spirit with us. I asked his spirit to be with me, to inhabit me, that we would share this meaty body in the three dimensional world. He has always been with me and motivated my decisions for the future. Having and knowing him changed my life, he made a mark and I am constantly haunted by my mortality, I am aware that things might switch up at any moment, that I mustn’t take life for granted, that everyday is a blessing and an opportunity to live out your best life. I am still fighting for an amazing life not just for me but for my friend who never got his chance. An amazing life for me is one with excess capital to create, make my dreams come true, to love and help as many people as I can. I want to make a contribution that is everlasting for humanity, but maybe none of that matters, the universe is in a constant flux and everything perishes. The ego is an illusion, no one will remember me, no one really cares and nothing matters in any case.

This is dedicated to my friend who died saving someone else, thank you for the lessons, memories and absolutely everything, as long as I am alive, you are alive – forever alive in our memories.

RETSHI – he had Respect, Empathy, stood Tall, was Special, was Hercules amongst us, let him always be our Inspiration.

Lost ones

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Lost ones

I have simulated losing everything in my mind. This is a stoic exercise that helps me conquer fear. Because if I am comfortable losing everything then I am free. Free to self-realize. Free to be what destiny intended. Free to be great. Life is broader than material things. Life is emotions, perceptions and sensations. Life is awareness. Life is presence. Life is precious. Life is a miracle. Life is a beautiful process that keeps on getting better. Life is evolution and progression. Life is freedom. Life is creation. Life is love. I realized a while back that earth was heaven. Heaven is not some utopia that you get to. Heaven is already within. Heaven is what you create and God gave us complete control of our minds to create. Expression is creation and mind is expression. This is it. It doesn’t get better than earth. It doesn’t get any better than this, this moment. It doesn’t get any better than what is within. You have the responsibility to create your own heaven, heaven is a state of mind. My heaven is one where I am a Billionaire. Being a Billionaire for me represents infinite creation. A chance to implement my dreams and to color in the world. It is a chance to help. I’ve got a big heart and at my core I am love and I want to give life to that expression. I’ve never really cared much for materials, I prefer creating experiences, they last longer. Still I’ve always loved money. Money is power. Money buys a priceless commodity, time. But it is also external, which makes it dangerous because it is out of your control. Because it is external, it can make you suffer because of the imprints you attach to it. Money can repossess your soul. The love and worship of money can make your heart leak like bullet holes. That’s if you identify with money. I just see it as a tool and I don’t want life to elude me because of a lack of it. That’s not what God intended for me, I live in complete abundance, everything I want is mine. So money can’t be a hindrance. From a very ripe age, my visions of the future would be of me working towards that ideal of attaining riches. I suspended everything for this vision and narrowed my focus and it created a fear that I’d be alone. It’s a fear that has manifested itself onto the world. I finally got a girl whose perfect in every sense. A girl who loved me before everything. She loves me and I love you. She is someone who can make me better, Lord knows I am flawed, messy and Imperfect. We can be better together. I need her. I don’t want to lose her. She takes care of me. Where else am I going to find this in this cold world where nobody really cares about me? Who has more value than her? I don’t know. Because of my flawed ambitions pertaining to money, I have to look ahead. Meanwhile time waits for no man. Paulo Coelho taught me that a woman can’t keep a man from achieving his personal legends and it makes sense for me. I am just ambitious that’s all there is to everything. Now that I am alone and have lost my best thing, now that the worst has already happened to me, I can labor on like a prisoner serving life in a concentration camp, with hope that everything will be better someday; Lost ones.

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Reflections

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Reflections

He said I still don’t know what I want to do with my life and it scares me. The expectations of everyone are putting me in the deep end and I don’t know how to swim. And so I am drowning, overwhelmed by everyone’s ideas of my life. I am reminded of the illusion of time and how I am not getting any younger. My peers are already settled but what does that mean? Because all I see is slow death that creeps on you like tobacco. The life of my peers is the cancer that grows and spreads exponentially. They have stopped living and are on a gradual decline to death. My peers are living quiet lives of desperation. Characterized by doing the same things everyday. Life has become a chore and growth is something that has eluded them. Nihilism creeps in on a daily and they often ask themselves, is this really worth it? Why don’t I just end it now? Isn’t it mercy? This can’t be life, there’s gotta be more!

I am tired of doing the same things everyday. My life is repetitive and I feel I am trapped in a loop. The sex is not all that great and I think my wife is having second thoughts. I am trapped in debts and the mortgage payments aren’t helping. I am slave, prostituting myself for the money and I am not enjoying it anymore. Everything is an obligation and lately I can’t bare to look at myself in the mirror. I don’t know who I am. I lost all my passions. My possessions have become my owners and I live in complete misery. I don’t know what happiness is anymore. Everyone in my life is fake and I have lost real connections. Everyone seeks to use me as a resource. I suffer from depression and most nights I can’t sleep. My life has become a Pavlovian experiment and the trauma is making me suggestible to all the injustices of life. Forced to love my servitude. My life is a propaganda campaign orchestrated by Nazis. The only thing that’s good in my life are my children. They are the glue that holds everything together, they bring relevance to my marriage. But I am happy, at least in society’s books that are massed produced for everyone. I am successful.

How can I look forward to that mode of existence, he reflected.

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Because The Internet (Life as a troll)

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Because The Internet (Life as a troll)

Popularizing the internet was met with a big problem, that it would generate an existential crisis within the population. The internet would unlock so many dimensions and doors for the mind that it would struggle to distinguish reality from fables. Not that the internet would cause a cognitive decline but rather that the lines would be so blurred and so thin that reality and the internet would objectively constitute as one. Unsupervised, the internet would be a black hole, sucking humanity off its roots into an abyss – uncharted territory, for the mind to find its feet in a world of subjective space. However, the internet had been humanities greatest achievement. Our denial of death resulted in the concoction of forever. With the advent of the internet we could do whatever we wanted. It was a terrific tool. Communication barriers would be bridged. Entertainment widespread and rife and instant gratification would be the norm. Not making this available to the general public would be the greatest injustice in the history of humankind. It would deem us primitive in the context of time. Humanity needs this leap to fulfil what our soul’s desire the most – immortality.

In 2013, Donald Glover aka Childish Gambino released an album titled “Because the Internet” and it is about the struggle between real life and the internet. The album sounds like it is staged on the internet, like a blog – it is subjective yet crowded, authentic and reflects the times of this recently constructed timeline of the internet. It is scattered with different sounds and music, indicating the vast and different worlds on the internet. On the song “II. Worldstar” Gambino, mocks people who spend most of their time on the entertainment website (worldstarhiphop.com) watching fights instead of engaging with life. The album explores existentialism, the meaning of life, death, boredom, depression, love and fabricated happiness. He uses the internet as a metaphor to contrast it with life, especially with the notion that life is a loop. To communicate this point he makes the first track of the album and the last seconds of the last track on the album the same. The album loops and ever ends indicating the subjects covered in the album form part of a repetition in the game of life and the internet. Lupe Fiasco testifies on this sentiment on his hit single “Old School Love” when he states “Your future is somebody else’s past”. On the last song of the album he makes a bold declaration indicating that the internet and life is one of the same thing and that there’s no major distinction – life is a troll and the joke is on us. His words echo Horace Walpole who once stated “Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel.” Glover extends his sentiments on the comic nature of life when he states “Funny, the day you born that’s really your death sentence.” The internet has the power to preserve and immortalize your spirit but once you are gone, your spirit is looped in the realm of time creating a pathological order in the world: so much for immortality, the joke is on you, for if you elevate your perspective you’ll see yourself as a grain of sand on a dessert. There’s no such thing as immortality.

You have to marvel at Glover’s intelligence, the album is a masterpiece. The internet has devoured reality perceived through our senses. What constitutes as reality is no longer objective but subjective. The Internet used to be abstract but it’s a very real thing now. Reality is blurred. The internet has immersed itself with our senses. We have become cyborgs – one with our smartphones that are connected to the internet and artificial intelligence. We cannot live without the internet. It has opened up doors that are impossible to close. Galaxies that are impossible to count and personas that need to be fed. We feared the internet would turn illusions into reality, we feared that it would leave us disconnected, we feared that it would make our minds passive, we feared over indulgence would lead to addiction, we feared that it would leave us lost – and it has, it has done everything and more. But it is still one of the coolest things we have invented. Life has improved, we have developed into a multifaceted species with god-like powers! When we finally get the meaning of life it will be because the internet – just kidding! There is no meaning.

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