I was down sick for about a week because of some weird and shitty little bug that’s on a rampage across Bangalore. Even the doc wasn’t sure what it was; it was either viral fever or dengue. Whatever it was, the damn thing did a number on me. I was knocked out for days. Every single goddamn part of my body ached. Some parts that I didn’t even know existed also started aching.
Apparently, my platelet count was dropping like Dogecoin in a bear market, and I freaked out for a minute. I’m not gonna lie; I thought I was dying. As I was contemplating death on what could've been my deathbed, all that I cared about was you, my dear reader—what would happen to your life if my wisdomful presence wasn’t around? I’m a bit like Mother Teresa that way.
The worst part was the fatigue. Goddamn it, I couldn’t take two steps before having to bend over, hold my knees, and take a breath. It was fucking painful and embarrassing at the same time. I felt like an 80-year-old fossil.
I don’t remember exactly, but it was either day three or four, and I was sitting in the hospital waiting room to speak to the doc and see how long I had left to live. I remember vividly that I was bloody tired, so I think I had more weight on my right buttock. Why is that important, you ask? No reason. I just want you to know that you have the pleasure and privilege of reading this post because of the heavy burden that my right buttock bore during the week.
As I sat there on an uncomfortable steel chair, leaning forward on my right buttock, I had a profound and stunning thought. I didn’t have the profound and stunning thought because I was trying to have it.
No.
I was too fucking tired to even think. The thought just popped into my head in a split second without any prompt. Just like that. It was the immaculate conception of this profound and divine thought.
It’s like one of those times where you are sitting comfortably on a bed browsing great works of literature and thoughtful articulations about the ultimate destiny of humanity on Instagram, and suddenly you get the urge to take a shit. There’s no biological or anatomical prompt; it’s just that you feel this sudden urge to unburden your bowels. One minute prior to having the urge to take a shit, you didn’t have the urge. But just one minute later, you do. My having the profound and stunning thought was exactly like that.
What was this profound little thought I had, you might be wondering?
Fucking wait, man. Or woman. I’m progressive.
You don’t go to a Martin Scorsese movie and fucking heckle the projectionist to fast forward to the end 30 minutes into the movie, do you? Well, unless it’s The Irishman, of course.
The profound and stunning thought I had was about the meaning of life. Yeah, no biggie. I sat there in the hospital waiting to know if I was dying, and I solved the meaning of life. It was exactly like the time Buddha achieved enlightenment. Only he was sitting under a tree, and I was sitting in a hospital.
But when it comes to the impact of the profound and stunning thought I had, it will be no less than the impact Buddha had on humanity. But I’m far too humble, unlike Buddha, to say it out loud. There are like a bloody thousand books about that Buddha dude. Talk about narcissism.
The great thought just materialized. Like, how great am I? It’s sometimes scary to think how wisdomful I am. It’s a curse, trust me. No human should be cursed with the burden of such and so much wisdom.
It hit me that the meaning of life is to avoid dying.
Profound, right?
Now, if you have gotten so far and braved through my long setup to this moment, you might feel disappointed with my thought. You might even think that it’s such a useless thought. To that I say, I pity that you are this pitiful and un-wisdomful creature that doesn’t have the mental faculty to grasp the profundity of my thought. Don’t take it the wrong way; not everyone can be like me.
The meaning of life is to avoid dying. That’s it.
Let me explain.
Think about the day you are having. Think about how beautiful your life is, and think about how lucky you are to have all that you do in life. Now think about the day you've had until this moment and think about all the things that could kill you versus the things that can keep you alive.
The number of things that can kill us vastly outnumbers the things that can keep us alive. It's a bit of a fucking miracle that most of us are even alive.
You wake up in the morning. Well, let me pause here. Just in your sleep, there are a million things that could just kill you, like seizures, heart attacks, strokes, sleep apnea, and a hundred other things.
But let's say you wake up. Think about the number of common household objects that can either kill or seriously maim you, from misplaced knives and scissors to bug sprays, rodent poisons, cleaning liquids, pesticides, prescription medication, open flames, electrical appliances, and small choking hazards. You don’t live in a house but in a death trap.
Now, you are awake, and you go to the toilet and try to take a shit in peace, but you could just die shitting right there. Even until the early 2000s, diarrhea used to kill 2 million people a year. Now if you make it without shitting yourself to death, there are other things waiting to kill you, don't worry.
If you are one of those disgusting people that believe in things like fitness, etc., you psyche yourself up and go to the gym. In the gym, you imagine Arnold Shivajinagar's voluptuous biceps and start pumping iron. With your bad luck, a heavy dumbbell slips from your sweaty hands and crushes your skull. If you are reading this, this is why this entire nonsense about fitness is nothing but propaganda by the marketing people at Big Death.
Now if you survive the fitness bullshit, you come and take a shower. Here, you could drop your new scented aloe vera soap enriched with jojoba oil, tea leaves, and Assamese citrus, slip on the soap, bang your head against the bathroom wall, and then die eight days later from an undetected blood clot. Still want jojoba oil extract in your soap? The virtues of these damn soaps are all propaganda by Big Soap.
Let's say you somehow survive the shower and get ready to have a meal. Don't worry, there are plenty of other things just waiting to kill you. Our entire food system is fucked because of the rampant use of chemicals, pesticides, genetic modification, and God knows what else. And I haven’t even mentioned the problems due to industrialized agriculture.
Farmers and food companies work tirelessly so that we eat balanced diets rich with the latest and most nutritious pesticides, herbicides, and chemicals with all the fruits, vegetables, and foods we consume.
How would you like some 100% organic spinach rich in iron and enriched with Monsanto Roundup? Now pause and think for a second about the amount of poisonous shit we knowingly put in our bodies every day.
So far, I've only mentioned those things that are usually just lying around in our homes. We walk past them every day, and it's a miracle that we are even alive.
Then you eat your nutritious poisons and leave for work. You sit in your car with your windows rolled up. Now if you are unlucky, your car could have a carbon monoxide leak, and by the time you reach the office, you could be dead because of carbon monoxide poisoning. Yeah, your car has ABS, Bluetooth, and a sunroof. But don’t be fooled by those cute and sexy headlamps; it’s fucking trying to kill you.
But if your car doesn't kill you, don't worry, there are plenty of selfless people who volunteer every day to kill people. Indian roads are fucking deathtraps. If you have the misfortune of living in Bangalore, then following the traffic rules will kill you.
People driving on the wrong side can come and crash into you, then abuse you, your family, and your extended relatives for having the audacity to be on the right side of the road when someone is peacefully driving on the wrong side. It's not the fault of the guy riding on the wrong side; it's your fault for being there when that other person was driving on the wrong side. How dare you?
Driving on Indian roads is like Super Mario except that the barrels are actual cars trying to kill you and you get no extra lives. One wrong move and you’re dead. Poof. You’re worm nutrition.
If other vehicles don't kill you, the air will. For centuries, we have been slowly but steadily adding nutrients like nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, and all sorts of microscopic particulate matter to our atmosphere. The air we breathe is so rich with these nutrients, and the very breath we take is killing us. How wonderful, no? The very breath we breathe is trying to kill us.
Now, if you survive all this and get to the office, there's always that asshole manager. These fucks get meaning in their lives by making people under them miserable. Other people's misery is their meaning. They create such shitty working environments that you might drop dead due to a stress-induced heart attack at work. Work hard, and you’ll make a lot of money, the marketing people at Big Work tell you. Yeah, for what? You could drop dead at any moment.
All the things that I have mentioned so far are external. Most of these objects are visible to the naked eye. Now consider the things that aren't visible to the naked eye but nonetheless can kill us from the inside. Just think about the number of tiny cowardly bugs that are just waiting to fucking kill us—the same kind of bugs that almost killed me.
These cowardly little shits are too fucking scared to be seen. The world is teeming with these sniveling little weasel bugs. They just lie there, like snakes in the grass, waiting for us to walk past them so that they can get inside our bodies and kill us, all without giving us a chance to look them in the eye. Cowards. They never let themselves be seen like men.
Oh, and I forgot nature. Yeah, that fucking lush green beautiful nature whose virtues people masturbate about. We are told that a peaceful walk in a park or spending some time in nature can heal and make us happy and calm.
Lies.
Nature is filled with killers. From tiny little insects to big fucking beasts, nature is a murderer. We've fallen for the propaganda by Big Nature that nature is beautiful and wonderful. My ass. It's teeming with things that can't wait to kill you. How would you like a wonderful death due to a snakebite in your ass as you sit in a park and enjoy the greenery and beautiful sun?
How would you like this on your tombstone?
“Here lies Mr. X, he was a loving father, a friend. Oh, and he got bit by a snake in his ass.”
Now if you think, well, why even risk stepping outside, considering the entire world is trying to kill you? You can’t even stay home. What if your house is located in an earthquake zone? One big tremor and you’ll break-dance your way to death. Even if your house is all sterile and death-proofed, loneliness is supposedly a killer and is as bad as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. How wonderful. Even our own fucking shadow is trying to kill us.
Now if all these things fail at killing you, I'm told by reliable sources that the entire fucking planet itself is trying to kill us by slowly tandoori-ing our asses. Some damn thing called climate change. The only fucking planet in the known universe to support life is killing us. Cue Louis Armstrong.
This is why I said the meaning of life is to avoid death.
Yeah sure, there’s all that bullshit about living a good life, finding work that adds meaning, loving, laughing, doing charitable nonsense, having kids who may very well kill you, etc. But these aren’t the priorities.
The first priority in life is to not die. You do the other so-called meaningful bullshit by taking a break from trying not to die. The most important thing we are trying to do in between all this unimportant shit is to avoid dying.
We’ve been convinced by Big Life and Big Shopping to chase meaning, a good job, a good family, the latest model of iPhones, boner pills, supplements, and shiny trinkets that will supposedly make us happy. But it’s all a distraction so that we forget that fact that Big Death is trying to get us.
The meaning of life is to avoid death.
That’s it.
Everything else is gas.
Meaning of life is to experience every moment and make our soul a matured one. This life is perfectly crafted by God to experience all that we can in this life. Once a soul gets all its planned experiences in that life then it will die and move on to next birth with further experiences in that life. All lives are for our soul's experience to mature.
How about "to avoid death to have the opportunity to read Bhuvan's latest quips" ;) As always, thanks for sharing.