As quickly as it has begun, it seems our time is coming to an end. As Spring Quarter, my time at The Daily, and even my time at Northwestern draw to a close, I would love to leave you with some cheeky advice on how to live better lives and solve the world’s problems.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any such information, but the one piece of advice I can give you is this – be wary of happy endings. I say this not out of literary elitism, but merely from a careful analysis of my own life experience. Happy endings do not exist. They are a pervasive myth in our society, yet they bear no similarity to the reality of human existence.
Five hundred years ago, children did not dream of toys or video games or money. The greatest joy they could imagine was simply to be so full of food that they wished to eat no more – a simple luxury which most never experienced in an entire lifetime. Today, avoiding starvation has become something of a subsidiary concern to putting on the appearance of starvation. Why has our plethora of foodstuffs failed to satiate us?
Indeed, our culture now enjoys amounts of health, wealth and liberty which would have surpassed the expectations of a happy ending for the large part of human history. To put this in literary terms, we’ve resolved some major conflicts, but new conflicts immediately replace the old. I am one of the relatively small percentage of humans in history to have experienced the lack of external conflict – a comfortable existence with no danger and no responsibility. Yet how do I spend this free time? I fill it with Lord of the Rings, Indiana Jones and War and Peace. I introduce self-resolving external conflict to avoid facing the unresolved internal conflict which otherwise awaits.
As humans, we are at our best when we are resolving conflict, and at our worst when we suppose that all conflict has been resolved. Utopian ideals have led to war, eugenics, genocide and other horrors of the modern age. No matter how great it feels to finish your last final this quarter, you can’t live off that feeling all summer by just sitting in your room. Get a job, or face the listless existential crisis at the end of the tunnel.
Perhaps this is why the idea of heaven has been so pervasive in human understanding through the years – our psyche is hard-wired not just to improve our station but to strive towards perfection, yet our human state is patently incapable of ever achieving that end. The skeptic sees heaven as the final myth, distracting us from the real progress which may be made in this life. The believer instead hopes that something within the human soul is transcendent, attaining a final peace in the hereafter. But whether you see the histrionic history of humanity as tragedy or comedy, don’t be too quick to plan your retirement. Life is only perfect in moments, and things only get better one step at a time.
