Why Am I Alive?

Why am I alive?

A mother woke up, climbed out of her bed and then woke her child. Calmly she dressed and cleaned both herself and the child. She was in her early thirties. The child was just two years of age. Both were fit and healthy. As a family, they were all happy.

Yet her secret was she wasn't happy. She had become fearful and anxious about the future for herself, her son and her family as a whole.

Within two hours of getting herself and her son dressed both were found dead. The mother had decided she didn’t want her son to grow up in a world that she felt had no future. She couldn’t see past the problems and the problems appeared to just grow and grow and time moved forward. Now with a young son, she was terrified about her son growing into this kind of ‘no future’ future. 

There is a question being raised through this action. The question being, “why am I alive?”

Since the first sunrise over man, this is one question that all thinking people have been asking. Some find the answer and some don’t. Some even don’t want the answer.

Yet we are born. We develop and grow. We eventually become an adult. As an adult, we make informed decisions and choices or we follow others blindly. If we follow blindly that means repeating what we have been told by others and repeating what they have also been told by others. These repeated patterns are so deeply embedded that most of the time most accept them as a fact. Most of the time they are there to be questioned Most of the time they are rarely a fact.

Have you heard people saying the world is a mess? And eventually, you also say this world is a mess? Yet is it a mess? If we read only good things daily we would very quickly start to believe this world is amazing. What we feed ourself is what we start to believe.

Most of humankind will be born and then die. Yet there are some of mankind that will grow and develop into something that most will admire and stand in awe over.

These are the ones that have dared to ask the most natural question, “why am I alive?”

The question raises another question. It is this. If I am alive and realise I am here to do greater things should I search for what that greater thing is?

There can only be one way to find answers. That way is a philosophical approach based on reason and logic and never opinions of others. This means to find out why we are alive we need to go deeper and create a pattern of questioning things. That depth is within our own mind. The very questions to pull out the obvious logic.

Once we ask ourselves a question we also have to provide ourselves with an answer. That answer might not be what we were wanting to hear but it is the answer that we probably need to hear at that moment.

I do wonder why I am alive? Why am I here?

Those that find out the question to this early will fare better in life. Yet the that discover the answer later it doesn’t mean it is too late. It simply means it took a longer route to arrive at that point.

Sadly the mother at the start missed an opportunity. That opportunity was that she had delivered a son that never got the chance for himself to ask the question of why. 

All people that do great things are born. I don’t believe they are born to do great things but I do believe that some pathways into life give people a better or stronger foundation for them to build on.

Rather than taking the life of herself and her young son surely, it would have been better to ask this question.

Is my son going to be one of those people that fix things, put things right and help create a new world? Someone's son or daughter has to be that person and it could have been hers.

All great men and women are born. They all have parents. They are all given the same basic start  - life - as all other people that are born. Even poor and so-called underclasses can become great people and do great things.

The mother failed to see past her now and was focused on a future point that hadn’t arrived and couldn't be mapped out.

Is this why we are alive. 

We are alive to do our best.

We are alive to take control of our very mind and flesh and to maximise what we have been given. To do our best we must feed our mind with the best or better things. To feed our mind the best things we need to avoid the cheap take away information that is filling the world through smartphones or unreality TV and plastic celebrities. To do that we have to avoid endless feeds that fill our minds with nothing in particular.

And of course,

This isn’t to degrade the woman that took her own life.

She was the victim and was her young son. Maybe she had been trying to live the unlovable life based on what media had been feeding her mind as what is best for her? Whatever her reason was it failed her and her son.

Shocking, sad but almost unnoticed.

She did of courses leave a note on her sideboard.

It simply read,

“Why am I alive?”

There is something very fundamental going on here. It isn’t new. In fact, it's been this way forever. It is the lack of philosophical education given over to the masses so they can live a better life. We teach and feed the useless things. This can only result in one outcome.

Yet we haven’t really answered the question, “why am  alive?”

Maybe it's a question that cannot be answered yet is it a question that demands the best answer we can find.

What do you think?

Leave your comment or join me on my social feeds.

Peace.

Modern philosopher, Alan Forrest Smith

Why Is Life The Way Life Is?

The book Escape from Zoomanity asks and tries to answer the questions here.