Who am I?
Since I can’t know which part of my life is the middle, I have decided to skip the mid-life crisis and to have a perpetual ongoing crisis. That’s when the big question hit me. Who the fuck AM I?? I know that I’m a human as a species, engineer as a professional, terrible writer as a hobby but seriously, who am I? and what makes me special?
That’s when I decided to go on an extensive journey to find myself. Travel to the ends of the world, explore the peaks and depths of the planet, looking for meaning and purpose in my life. But my bank balance said no and I ended up settling for a psychology class at Yale University (Online).
Before we discuss our own purpose and meaning of life, I would like to tell you about a guy called René Descartes.
Descartes was French, he was rich, he was part of the French royal family and he lived during the renaissance, the 17 century, which is like the most colorful century in the entire human history. If I had all 4 of these, I would just chill and do nothing. Just eat, sleep, and repeat. Kind of what I’m doing right now but in a much much grander way.
Descartes, being a bad boy decided to make the world a better place instead of sitting around and spend all his daddy’s money. He become a scientist and did some science stuff. Then he decided to become a mathematician and did some math stuff. I am assuming you are familiar with the way we denote three-dimensional spaces as a collection of two-dimensional surfaces that are each divided into four quadrants by an x-axis and a y-axis. René introduced it and named it after himself calling it the cartesian system. Absolute power move and he didn’t stop there.
He decided to become a philosopher. We will pause here and let me tell you one thing. Every time I hear the word Philosopher, I immediately imagine a very old man with white hair, wearing silk robes and sitting on a balcony sipping wine. Some 100 people are standing under his balcony just waiting for him to say something and the philosopher eventually goes “Life is, good” and the crowd goes, “Yass! that’s philosophy!!”, “hashtag quote of the day”, and so on and so forth.
So our bad boy Descartes decided to become a Philosopher and like all philosophers of that time, he drank a lot of cough syrup. Fun fact about cough syrup during the renaissance: it has copious amounts of cocaine and other weird stuff in it. I don’t blame them. I do understand the logic behind drugs in cough syrup. You can’t cough if you are not conscious. When someone’s brain is chilling in fantasy island, the last thing their body would want to do is go *cough* *cough*
So our Bad boy Descartes drank a lot of cough syrup and decided to take a walk in the park. Cut to the French Royal gardens. Let me paint a picture for you all, there is a long path of carefully arranged stones and a lot of greenery on both sides of the path. There is a statue of a very beautiful woman at the end and just in front of it to the right is a statue of her boyfriend. Now believe it or not people in the 17th century were familiar with robots, except they ran on hydraulic power instead of electricity. So when Descartes was walking down the path the steps under him compressed under his weight and push the water under them with force. This collective hydraulic energy is used to push the boyfriend’s statue forward, so by the time Descartes reached the end of the path boyfriend’s statue was in between him and the woman’s statue.
Descartes was already high as a kite on cough syrup and seeing all of this unfold in front of his eyes gave him an existential crisis. He could move, the statue could move. The statue has a purpose, he probably has a purpose. So what is the difference between him and the statue? He started thinking, kept thinking, and then thought even more and finally realized he could think! the dude can think!! the statue can’t do that! it’s just a huge rock! (no offense to Dwayne Johnson of course).
There is something inside him that is helping him think, some people, call it a soul, some people call it ‘just a bunch of neurons firing in the brain’. but whatever it is, it is a consciousness, that is making him think. The consciousness exists therefore he can think. He can think therefore he exists. He thinks, therefore, he is. I think therefore I am.
Cogito, ergo sum.
I don’t expect you to understand everything you just read. Take your time. To put this all into a modern context, just yesterday I was sitting on my balcony and watched a delivery guy delivering a Pizza to my neighbor. Suddenly a monkey came out of nowhere, grabbed the Pizza, and ran away, which was weird because we don’t have monkeys in my area.
Now,
Does a monkey think? Yes.
Does a monkey exist? Yes.
Does a delivery guy think? Yes.
Does a delivery guy exist? Yes.
Does Pizza think? No.
Does Pizza exist? No.
Wait Pizza doesn’t exist?! The consciousness of the Pizza doesn’t exist and that’s exactly what Descartes meant when he said I think therefore I am.
Now we know how we are different from all the other celestial material (rocks planets and stuff), We have the ability to think. But that still doesn’t solve our identity crisis. Who are you? Who am I? Who are we? We are confronted with a massive question, so let’s take a step back and see the big picture.
First, there was a big bang, then, there was nothing, eventually, there was something. A lot of time passed, and microscopic life evolved. Some more time passed and life evolved to the point of intelligent animals. Or at least that is the history of the universe most people believe in. The average human lifespan is 80 years. The universe is estimated to be around 14 billion years.
Life started way before you were born and will go on long after you are dead.
No matter what you do, good, bad, or epic will be forgotten. Believe me, legends have tried.
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”— Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley
There was a great ruler, Ramesses II (Greek name: Ozymandias) often regarded as the greatest, most celebrated, and most powerful pharaoh during the most powerful period of Ancient Egypt, and he built a lot of amazing stuff in his time, at his peak, if you looked at the grandiosity of Egypt you would definitely think, “Now that is a guy who made his mark on the humanity and will live forever in people’s memory“ well guess what?
Time happened.
The Grand kingdom fell long back and people have a terribly short attention span. The once ‘king of kings’ is now being used as a bad example by a terrible writer like me to prove a point. Life started way before you were born and will go on long after you are dead. No matter what you do, good, bad, or epic will be forgotten. So do you really need to know who you are? Does it really matter?
