We are vulnerable beings, always questioning and in doubt which is in most cases considered a negative trait. As we move to create our subcultures every day, the world tells us that life’s meaning is to find answers. But what does it mean to finally find an answer? This is what the world is revolving around, to give us an answer. It’s in the ads we see, the movies we watch, books we read, the passion we follow, social media hacks we allow yourselves to dwell into. Everything centers around the notion of validating your doubts and finally removing every single trace of them. Because come to think of it, doubts are wrong. Every establishment refutes it. Women in doubt are bad. Men can’t have doubts. Children can’t have doubts. They are chaotic. The world wants us to believe that we are born into a perfect world that is devoid of any questions and that all the questions have been answered.
I found myself in this axis once. Depressed and feeling inadequate. This arose after talking to a friend who told me how certain she was now about what she liked. She knew that what she values the most in life and what she aims to continue doing. She had found her calling. I was devastated. I felt rejected and cheated. Friends think alike. She suddenly seemed like a part of the world that considers itself perfect. So, I thought to myself- am I this inadequate? How can everyone have answers and I don’t?
So I just randomly googled like a loser- how important is it to have plans in life? Trust me that’s the worst thing you can do if you are feeling sad. Google your sadness. It only works if you want to know the early signs of pregnancy or dengue or malaria but google fails miserably if you ask it about life’s plans. So, I shut my laptop. It was 2:45 am and I had no one to talk to. No, not because I am alone, but I am trying to shut myself from the rest of the world that makes me feel inadequate. How arrogant, right? I mean asceticism will make me stand out so be it.BS. I fought with my boyfriend who is a kind soul and keeps telling me how amazing I am almost every single second of the day. I am distancing myself from my friends who have stood by me in the worst times of my life and most importantly I am distancing myself from my work where I thought I would be able to find the answers and sway around the questions all the time so that I can keep creating. But unfortunately, my work cheated on me like a crazy old boyfriend. It almost felt like I had a terrible make-out session with my work, and it got upset. I fucked up. How you ask? Very simple. I stopped thinking at work. I found all the answers. I found that this here is my love. I shouldn’t have. Blunder. Huge mistake. I said to myself that this is my calling, and this is all I want to do. I committed suicide. I shouldn’t have. The moment you find answers is when you kill yourself intellectually. I stopped looking out to learn more because I thought this is it. Now according to the set standards, this feeling should make me the most successful woman on earth because I have all the answers, right? But here comes the paradox. The myth. The world wants you to believe that you don’t know any answers but pretend like you know them all.
So, I changed my google search before I get into a dark hole of asceticism and denounce this world completely. I decided to find a way to deal with this fragmentation. What began next was endless google searches, flipping from one webpage to another. From Carl Jung to self-help YouTube channels with beautiful men and their eloquent speeches, I couldn’t stop myself. I was relieved that I was not the only loser. Many have lived in doubt and explored life’s meaning to the fullest. But sadly, they knew it and didn’t care about the world much. I don’t have the luxury to not care about the world. So, I magically stumbled upon an old book in my library. Beginning Theory by Peter Bary. Every literature student in DU has either gulped this book down or seen its cover and ran 20 miles away.
What happened after, was magical! Looks what I feel is a godman theory! I read and read one particular sentence again and again ‘while modernism laments the fragmentation, postmodernism celebrates it’
This idea disdains every bit of excess, every need to have a purpose and every desire to give meaning to things. So much so that there is no textbook definition of the word postmodernism. I can live in doubt and create a bad mixture of my emotions which can be ugly and distorted but it will still be mine. Therefore, there is no distinction between the real and the imagined. The chapter on Postmodernism expands the idea of Hyperreality and simulation by Jean Baudrillard. According to Baudrillard, everything we see around ourselves is governed by signs. They are responsible for shaping meaning or distorting them. He explains it in four stages:
- When signs represent the meaning and basic reality of the thing it depicts. Though Baudrillard explains it through paintings, I tried to see it through my life. Take life as it comes. Let it depict its meaning as it comes. Sometimes we need to stop overanalyzing things like falling in love, finding a passion, etc. There is a basic reality of life like the home we live, people we are surrounded with, work we do. These elements do not constitute complications and can be dealt with. Important, nonetheless. We become how we manage these things in our lives. As mechanical as it gets, one has to accept them and not try to correct them.
- The second stage of signs is when it distorts reality and misinterprets them. There will always be times when we will try to go back in time, pluck a moment or two from the past and paste it on our present. This is when we distort our realities (present). Time is not the reflection/ representation of life. The outcome of time is. And in this case, we are the outcome of time. So, distortion exists in our minds. If we start governing our lives based on the past or the future, we will always be in chaos. We will always be lost if we keep looking for answers in the past or future.
- The third stage of signs is when it makes you believe that there is no reality and it is only a representation. The reality is so evasive and evaporative that it doesn’t exist at all. Every piece of this world that we see outside our four walls is misinformed and corrupted. Now it may sound a little radical. But think about it, we all live in an illusion that wants us to believe what it believes. Hence, we should make this as short-lived as possible. You only realize this when you have crossed the first and second stages. You realize that the outside will always be a bundle of lies and the truth lives within you. No matter how fragmented it is, you create and manage the truth in your mind like the unwanted files in the spam folder. So while you let the outer you (in my case the Akriti who is known to friends and family) get completely driven by constructions, let your inner self be aware of these constructions and let it live in peace. In a nutshell, be harshly honest to yourself.
- The fourth stage is when you realize that signs have no relation to reality at all. This is when you realize that you are different, inadequate and wasted in life probably because whatever you are thinking is not making sense at all. Whatever you have built so far is nonexistent. But this is the stage that prepares you to keep exploring, to not stick to one kind of reality but create multiverses. To keep yourselves so fluid that even if your perception of the reality fades away, you can still create another one.
This is when I rested a little because I realized one simple thing after hours and hours of scrutiny that nothing is more important than strength. This strength is what will allow me to have doubts and questions with conviction. Believing in singularity makes us weak because nothing is going to last. There is no concrete reality but only fragmentations of it. So we can’t escape chaos because it lives within us. What will you do if the center falls apart, establishments, notions and ideas, everything disintegrates? Will you crumble with them? You will fight battles for it and eventually lose. That’s not what Darwin said. Survive as the fittest because the fittest is not the rigid coherent entity, it’s the conviction in the fluidity that makes the world go forward. Imagine a world that was stuck in the postindustrial era or imagine your personal life stuck in the time when you were angry as a teenager with your parents and rest of the world, will you still be there? Though childhood had its romanticism and a certain calmness that is difficult to find now, it all made sense back then. So, should we stop lamenting, leave it and move on? Sadly, we can’t do any of it. They are all stored in our heads.
I was back to where I had started but calmer and more optimistic. A kind of optimistic nihilist. And had one simple thought in my head that it is OK to have questions and it is OK to figure out life as my friend did but you need to be fluid and have the strength to change and ‘celebrate’ the fragmentation of life as it presents itself. To put it more radically, one needs to have guts to allow chaos to not ruin our minds but free us eventually.
