Too many otherwise smart people fall in the trap of optimizing their ability to navigate modern life, and then dying.
They focus on their health, go on diets, build muscle, buy expensive goods, keep an immaculate home, get a good education, have a brag-worthy spouse, invest sensibly, push their kids into the ivy league, and then, ..., nothing.
They read self-help books, advance in their careers, post their photos on LinkedIn or on Facebook with the well-known, watch the Game of Thrones, and then, ..., nothing.
They go on picturesque vacations, eat at Michelin-star restaurants, get spa treatments, use the best skin products, keep track of their health parameters, and then, ..., nothing.
...
Mechanism is one thing, and Destination is another. (this phrase is from my remembrance of a remarkable and life-altering essay by J Krishnamurti)
A life can be trivially wasted in shiny mechanisms, while the destination remains pithy, pitiful and prosaic.
It is fine to earn and to save money, if you have an idea on how that money can be used to go further. If with that money you buy a bigger house, and then you spend even more money to maintain that house, then the house has transformed, for you, from a mechanism that could enable you to do bigger things, to a beautiful cage.
A meaningful destination comes naturally to some, but vast numbers struggle to create an appearance of one or have no understanding of why it might be important. Why?
I hold that a destination is meaningful only insofar as it yields clarity, understanding and fulfillment.
If at the end of a day, you have taken ten thousand steps, and have eaten healthy, and have finished another chapter of a self-help book, that day must be recorded as a day preparing for life, not life itself.
We are not merely mechanisms, the core of being human is to think and to imagine and to dream and to elucidate and to clarify and to research and to create.
A life devoted to mechanism is a wasted life.
I believe it was Osho who once stated to the effect that for a poor man to embark on transcendence was a blessing, while for a rich man to NOT be interested in transcendence was a curse.
The aim of human life is to reach higher, not to spend all one's years in preparation of it.
All beauty, all strength, all vitality, all wealth, must be in honor of, and a tribute to, the mystery that is all around us. The mystery of an infinite universe and of us being able to see the stars in it at night.
Anything less seems like a pity, and more than a pity, and worse than a pity.
(this phrase taken, with admiration, from the last para of the outstanding essay by David Albert about a very different topic)
