This video of a swimmer diving into the ocean waters for a fun swim that goes terribly wrong went viral on Twitter (Click on this video link to watch the video before you proceed further). While I was bracing for a shark attack, what actually transpired was just the opposite - so uneventful yet far more disconcerting. If you take out the swimmer, the video is just footage of ocean wave after ocean wave crashing indifferently against the rocks. Put him back in and it is a gruesome record of a swimmer fighting for his life while the ocean repeatedly thwarts his efforts to climb ashore. In comparison, a shark attack would have been less shocking and easier to comprehend as the malicious intent of the shark to maim and kill would at least acknowledge the swimmer as an independent entity. The ocean, on the other hand, is blissfully unconcerned or rather, unaware of the swimmer struggling for his life as a consequence of its actions. Considering the vanity inducing narratives that we have come to believe, it is disturbing to discover the truth of our irrelevance in the grander scheme of things.
Most of the narratives that humans have built around humanity are variations of the hypothesis that portray us as divine souls imprisoned in a mortal body to serve a predestined purpose, with a higher power handholding us through every step of our life. It is understandable then that we have positioned ourselves at the centre of the universe and expect the entire world to revolve around us. For early humans left at the mercy of nature, such anthropocentric narratives were perhaps necessary to nurture hope, seek reassurance and maintain a semblance of self importance in a hostile environment where deaths and destruction were an everyday affair.
The fallout of continuing to hang on to such narratives in a vastly different environment where humans appear to enjoy a sense of supremacy over their surroundings is a degree of self obsession that conveniently makes us forget our place in the order of the universe and bestows us with the audacity to raise the question ‘Why did this happen to me?’, whenever reality fails to conform to our desires. Or rather, as one of my friends summed it up succinctly (and egotistically, if I may add) - ‘Why do bad things happen to good people?’. Scores of literature have been written venturing an answer to this fundamental question that has perplexed humanity through the ages. Religion, in an attempt to position itself as an answer to this question, has propagated belief in an accounting system that is capable of keeping track of our virtues and sins. Yet, somehow, a satisfactory answer seems to elude humanity.
Witnessing an ant getting flushed down a drain finally put matters in perspective for me. It made me wonder whether a swimmer getting drowned at sea was just as uneventful and meaningless. By picking ourselves up from our imagined position at the centre of the universe and relegating us to where we rightly belong - in the fringes of a great grand canvas, makes it evident that we are, at best, a rounding error in the reckonings of the universe and the control that we exert over our circumstances is infinitesimally participative. Then the only theory that can satisfactorily answer the question that has plagued humanity is ‘arbitrariness’ - everything that transpires during our lifetime, including our birth and death, are random events that are inadvertent repercussions of an universe going about its business, blissfully unaware of our presence.
In our endeavor to attain relevance, have we allowed cultural norms to dictate the purpose of our pursuits and societal narratives to define the meaning of our lives? In our attempts at self-aggrandizement, are we being forced to take our lives too seriously? Would coming to terms with our irrelevance grant us the license to treat life with the degree of flippancy it deserves and liberate us from the obligation to validate our existence by aspiring to meet societal standards of success? Would we then be able to simply exist, revel in the joy of mindless pursuits and reconcile ourselves to our irrelevance? Or would we be mired in an existential crisis unbearable enough to rekindle our craving for the facile reassurance that these anthropocentric narratives promise?
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Dedicated to: Nikhilesh Bhargav and Rishi Rathi
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