The Age of Worry

There is a common theme in the modern individual. We worry. In high school we worry about college. In college, we worry about our career. During our careers, we worry about retirement. After retirement, we continue to worry about life. We can’t sleep because we worry about the day. We stay asleep as we worry about our health. We stand before the mirror and worry about our image. We worry that we worry too much and that only worries us more. To counteract worry, we prepare. We subdue the worries of tomorrow by spending today on tomorrow. Then we sleep, wake and prepare once more.

Sleep, wake, work, prepare, sleep, and over and over and over. Then we numb ourselves by the blinding screen and deafening music and then we worry some more. The modern man is insistent upon stacking the burdens of tomorrow on today. This cycle continues until we break beneath the weight of our burdens and we find ourselves at a philosophical crossroads. 

One path is an admission that life is overbearing and too complicated to understand much less lead. This is the path of defeat. The other path is turning away from life and wearing the tinted lens of hope. Then, our worries fade as we are no longer perceiving the world for what it is. This is the path of blindness.

We cannot take the path of defeat. Everything we have, everything we have seen, touched, and felt, all rely upon the acceptance of life. There is but one true master of life, and it is yourself. To lose the one gift we are all given at birth is the highest degree of irrationality. We may never find victory, but we can never submit to defeat. 

Then, we turn to hope, we can hope that despite reaching the top numerous times, next time there will be an angel to lift the rock from our shoulders and take us away from this accursed hill. But the spiritual stands in the realm of belief, it cannot be observed, measured, nor rationalized. If we are to deny rejection for irrationality, we must also deny hope. So we reject the leap of faith and are left alone upon our hill once more.

However, there exists one more option. If there is no rational path away from the absurd, we must accept the absurd. We must bear the rock and carry it to the peak knowing there is nothing to the world but ourselves and our burdens. We must accept the absurd and live.

Each word we write, each weight we lift, each problem we solve, we become better, the rock becomes lighter. Each time we lift the rock to the peak we are rewarded with nothing, and that is fine. We lift our burdens, not as slaves to the demands of life , but as liberated individuals choosing life in an absurd world. We choose to lift this burden, we choose to live. In the face of absurdity, we see that we are only individuals, that we cannot wrangle the world into manufactured meaning. Thus, we too conclude that all is well. Within the struggle to the heights lies happiness.

— William Ouyang