Depending on perspective, world and living itself will have a different meaning. And so because depending on a person, the perspective changes at least a little bit, I believe it is impossible to give the experience of living the perfect definition. Of course, if you believe in some of the existing ideologies, you might also believe that there is something certain, that there is an absolute truth, whether it be God or something else. However, no matter how certain you are in your belief, there will always be a number of people who disregard it completely. That being said, if I say world is a game of sorts, it is logical to conclude that, taking what was said above into the account, this game will never have a winner — as long as there is more than one person alive on the whole Earth.
But I think it is still worth to take a look at how this game is being played: after all, this is, essentially, what affects our living, whether you are an apolitical individual dreaming of living off-grid and thinking that you’ve got no business with the outside world, or an average city person following a more conventional path.
Here’s a question: Do you believe in an individual responsibility? Or in a fundamental responsibility that the humanity has toward everything else (by “everything else” I literally mean anything that is not human)? It’s kind of a lot to take in, isn’t it? I mean, here you are: woke up, started your day, trying to go on existing and suddenly you become that titan that holds up the globe on his shoulders. It can’t be, right? How can we go on living, some of us trying to micromanage whatever little is happening in our lives, and simultaneously consider our decisions and act with such a broad, absolute perspective? So, naturally, majority of us just doesn’t. Which is ok, as it is probably what keeps people sane — being able to abstract yourself from the global happenings and focus on things at hand.
However, in our lifetime many of us will do something at least once, that will have a considerable impact on someone or something else: it could be you creating a “core” memory for your sibling, or founding a corporation that’ll lead the market and in turn influence economical policies that government makes, like what happened with sugar industry in the US. You could even not know about some of the things you’ve done, but, nevertheless, the point’s the same: you do something and it has a certain effect on the world. There we come to the argument often made in similar discussions, which goes something like this: well, if the impact is so small that not even many people are aware of it, then it should be rendered practically insignificant, or even non-existent. I believe it is at least one of the reasons why some people feel that what they do doesn’t matter. Let me develop this thought further by giving an example (it should be understood that this is not the perfect example, but rather the one that illustrates the point I’m trying to make effectively). Lately we’ve been hearing of so-called “bullsh*t jobs”: the jobs that are redundant and serve no useful purpose, but still make up the big chunk of the job sector. People continue doing them and most of the time their main concern is that nothing interesting or useful comes out of it. But what we should keep in mind, is that nothing and no one exists completely on its own. So these jobs, too, have an effect, albeit the negative one: people unsatisfied, the whole system being corroded with forced upside-down logic of “success”. Now let’s imagine, what if we defined as influence, or “real” impact on the world was anything that comes out of your actions. Someone sneezed and you said to them “bless you”? Good manners in such simple situation often go unnoticed, but now you’ve literally made the world a better place by being polite, by keeping up the appearances, by showing the progress of civility in such tiny detail. We can move up and down the scale of deeds, from sweeping the floor to imposing political sanctions, but the fundamental importance stays now the same: we acknowledge the responsibility on the individual level for everything going on and all this individual responsibility accumulates to the collective one whenever people collaborate. On the one hand, yes, that means that if another roadkill occurs, you are among responsible, because you a part of humanity, and the driver in question bears the personal responsibility in addition to that. Is your responsibility any less than that of the driver, because it is collective? No. Should you agonize now over everything going on in the world: over children being killed, animals tortured, forests destroyed, income gaps widening, wars raging, senseless crimes committed, corrupt politicians exposed and replaced with other corrupt officials, social media influencers doing stupidest imaginable things, grown adults not being able to contain themselves when a baby is crying on the plane … and the list goes on? Well, perhaps you can agonize over this a little. And then some more. And then some more. But don’t let this make you turn to escapism again to return to the sweet, sweet idea of having nothing to do with it. Because you do, you are a human being and even if somethings is going on on the opposite side of the globe, you are, by definition, bearing the collective responsibility as a part of humanity. Removing the direct cause and effect doesn’t mean you have the right to think you have nothing to do with what is happening. What we can accept, however, is that there is often nothing major we can do on a personal level about many of the things fellow humans dare to commit. Thus, you might cry your eyes out as much as you want watching the documentaries about child predators and how infuriatingly late they’ve been brought to justice, but there is nothing you personally can do about it. And that is normal. But there is always something in your power: to stand with the cause, even if in your circumstances it means only verbally supporting it, or to think of ways how to make the world a better place, where you wouldn’t need to be a part of the same species that enjoy cruelties unknown to animals, in contrast to which we pride ourselves to be oh so incomparably intelligent.
I think we should rethink the importance we put on the things we do according to the scale of their impact. Because inevitably we go after what brings in more praise and the simple pillars of human decency become forgotten. Why is it that we lose the compassion, innate humility and honesty in the name of the “greater good”? Good is good, it is not up to anyone to quantify and to estimate how much it’s worth. Perhaps if we saw all our deeds as equals, we would appreciate small nice ones more, be less arrogant when achieving success with bigger ones and be more careful and compassionate rolling the dice on decisions while being in the position of power.
