The only way to live is to dig deeper

Philosophy has been the home of my thoughts ever since I married myself to the idea of the mind over everything else. In my last year of high school, I had this intuition to choose Philosophy as my second choice of degree programs in a university that I applied to. With my first choice being a literature program, having both in my college application form raised the eyebrows of almost all adults in my family. Eventually, I got accepted into the university’s literature program and graduated 4 years after.

Questions like, why didn’t I select an Engineering program instead since I am an academic achiever, or did I aspire to become a priest, and the likes buzzed around the dawn of my university life. Those questions were accompanied with some pang of disappointment and confusion. Even though I was emotionally immature back then, being raised in a passive-aggressive household opens your third eye for bullshit that other people emanate.

Fast forward to recent years, I just had this conversation with my mother about how is it that narcissistic people are allowed to exist in this world. How much we both loathe and avoid people who are so full of themselves and terribly unkind to people they just met. This conversation went on for hours, with each of us telling our own stories about our various encounters with narcissistic people. What I ended up telling her is that I would not have chosen any other degree program in college knowing what I know now. It essentially became the foundation with how I understand the world and other people.

Studying Literature in college gave me enough adjacent space to dabble into philosophy whenever I can and from there, I worked my way upwards in becoming comfortable with its language. All of its complexities and untranslatable concepts from a philosopher’s mother tongue—especially its daunting mental exercise to grasp an idea to reread a passage multiple times before finally arriving to its meaning. This practice led me to lay the foundation of how I come into terms with my surroundings. It gave me a functional framework on how to live and die well.

As I am slowly easing my way into adulthood, I see a lot of friends and family members struggling to understand themselves. Albeit there is no lack in understanding the world, but there is a noticeable gap in seeing themselves in their own eyes. I see the confusion in their eyes with every form of serious conversation. I become a witness to their unconscious denials about their shortcomings—the automatic knee-jerk reaction to every “Well what if you’re wrong?” prompt that I throw at them. What I see is a shell that was formed around them that has become tough to crack due to lack of self-awareness and a lack of healthy habit of self-criticism.

On the other side of the spectrum, online social media discourse has become tainted by the triumph of self-expression. It has become hedonistic at this point, which feeds on every man’s narcissistic tendency in chase of clout. This phenomenon is not new and what we have been observing since the dawn of social media, which is now taking its most naked form. The democracy of tools to express oneself, to perform to an audience of strangers without the friction of accountability and discipline of sharing one’s unprocessed thoughts and emotions gives the promise of unearned and unnecessary attention.

In this environment, self-awareness is the underdog. There is no more effective criticism than what the self provides, given that the self-criticism is an established habit birthed by discipline and transformative decisions. In this same vein I see my peers who lack self-awareness also go through adulthood at the same time as me lose parts of themselves that helped us bond together as young adults. It is heartbreaking and disappointing to see hope fade from their eyes. Every conversation is now prompted by a recent miserable event, which is objectively due to their poor decision making. At this point, I do not tell them this because I have already said my piece countless times over in the past years. So I took the necessary distance to give myself enough headspace as I was slowly becoming their therapist.

At this point, I am thankful to myself for having this propensity to reason and in turn, philosophy. It felt like I have prepared my mind and my soul to the adversities of adulthood despite its challenges. Of course, I still find it very difficult oftentimes as anxieties take on different forms and come in the most inopportune moment but what I observe is that it has been difficult to break my spirit. I find myself constantly digging to the deepest recesses of my psyche like a habitual expedition towards the unknown. Every attempt to go down my own mind is a new learning opportunity whose worth is valued by how much bruises I experience when I ascend back to my conscious self.

Examining the self is an activity for most people that may induce fear, only because the mind is wired to protect itself from pain—whether it is physical or psychological. The ultimate barrier to self-discovery is one’s own mind, which is if not disciplined nor self-aware, would become a danger to itself. In this case, philosophy, with all its difficulty in exercise and exploration of the human mind in writing, helped me lay down the foundation to overcome life’s absurdities and adversities. What I encourage is for anyone reading this to do the same. It is difficult but nonetheless goes a long way to keep your sanity intact.

One of life’s most unfortunate events is the feeling of losing one’s own self—not the actual loss of it. The moment of losing the self is the hell of existence. It is something that I may have come close to and do not wish for anyone to experience it.