Silver lining : Tough times

All of us have gone through tough times in life; times when you feel like you don’t matter anymore, when you’re gasping for a hand to hold on to as you’re drowning and all that glides through your fingers is water. I’m currently 10 feet under and can see the sun receding and feel the chill of the water. So it is in this state that a random thought crossed my mind: ‘There has to be a silver lining to this’. This was profound, among all this suffering, among all the endless hours before falling asleep, among the mornings too heavy to get up, among all the hands, texts and calls that never materialized to pull you up and among the ones that did, there was something good, apart from the obvious “What doesn't kill you makes you stronger”. As you might have guessed, rather obviously, I wanted to find that damn silver lining to this dark cloud and finally be able to say ‘Ah there you are you little bugger; the outlier, the anomaly, the aberration that changes everything! Now you’re going to pull me up to that sun that’s running away shamelessly’

But that wasn't my only motivation. I had slowly stated losing my faith in humanity. I was among the fortunate (or unfortunate depending on how you look at it) people who started out with the assumption ‘innocent until proven guilty’. To put it axiomatically: If we can define something called fundamental humanness (elusive like Euclid’s point that has no breath, width, length or extant which is basically nothing), then majority of people within a few standard deviations have it. By definition of ‘fundamental humanness’, these people will be kind, caring, consistent and all the other good things you talk about. However through experience I had found out that most people were all this when it suited them, but when it didn’t and you were looking for a hand to hold on to, it was just too slippery. There were people on the other side of the curve too, who showed this elusive set of traits when it suited them the least; but their number left you wondering about the skewness of the distribution, much more than what you would care to admit.

An equally strong argument that stands its ground well is perfectly encapsulated by “To err is human”. We aren't creatures created by some divine being to uphold all these values: we’re what came to be because of the omnipotent and utterly selfish thing called DNA (RNA too if you want to split hairs) which wants nothing but to make copies of itself in what looks like a very narcissistic and utilitarian way. We’re just consequences of these little vibrating self-replicating molecules that haven’t eased up on their little pursuit since the origin of life. Hell even altruism can’t be explained in all circumstances. So it is in the background that you've to view people’s actions. We don’t know which is the hen or which is the egg between brain chemistry and conscious thought and free will. The plumbing and wiring of consciousness and its manifestation in brain structure and chemistry is still mostly a mystery. People haven’t gone as far as to say everything is a delusion and there is no free will, but there is considerable proof that beyond basic emotions and impulses for survival and reproduction, nothing much is genetic. It is the meta-genome which we have evolved in Dawkins’ words, which I sincerely hope is for enhancement of our survival that might be responsible for ‘fundamental humanness’. Like all things that were not built top down, it will have enough bugs to make any coder weep. It’s simply too ambitious to expect it to work every time (Just a metaphor in case you’re wondering :P I am a staunch atheist and think that creationism is poppycock)

Now that you've read so far, let me tell you that despite my best efforts I don’t know which makes more sense. You can find enough instances of both, of people going with their biological instinct without so much as a flinch and going against it with equal fervor. However to add to the already muddy waters, I have a third level of complexity. The proposition is that there is a middle ground between these two, the place where there you model whatever little bit of conscious thought that is left to you after the cut given to brain chemistry. In this space you model your behavior based on the social set up, aspirations and ideas you were born and bought up with, for reasons that I have no clue about, experimentally speaking. It seems possible that we do this to justify what we’re doing, to construct a narrative from the chaos of reality; after all we’re bought up with bedtime stories. If you make your own narrative, why shouldn't you be the one wearing cape and underpants outside? This is where the problem starts; we possibly have a biological machine that is less than perfect, which makes you or helps you err and we have the narrative to write in which we can’t be Lex Luther.

So you cope with it sometimes by distorting reality, by controlling brain chemistry (or is brain chemistry controlling you ?) by adding a line here and there and cutting out a few paragraphs here and there so that what you’re doing is justified. Even if you feel what you've done is wrong, you can be comfortable ‘this was what I could do then’. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't: no one presumably knows or there is no answer, but you definitely don’t want to find out.  Very unfortunately, this sometimes goes against ‘fundamental humanness’. Then again you’re the son/daughter of the selfish gene.

Again I don’t know the end of this debate about reality (which might also be an illusion :P ) and consistency of human behavior. I can leave you with two parting thoughts.

One: it seems that statistically best solution is the surround yourself with a good enough number of people you love and care about so that every time, some of them will be there to hold your hand. I take no responsibility of the emotional repercussions that might arise from application of this idea.

Two: for the valiant and brave who might be wondering what the silver lining was, I don’t really have an answer. The general idea was that by looking at these things, we could understand how human beings tick and maybe use it to navigate our lives a bit more smartly. 

P.S I am no expert on these topics except for occasional reading of books, articles and papers. So I really don't know the latest cutting edge developments as much as a person from the field and please forgive me for any inconsistencies if there are any.

Special thanks to my sister for helping me balance the views :* !