All life begins in the womb, a confinement in another living being. Few weeks after the start of a new life a being is formed, innocent as can be. Without any sense of what morality is, he fights and survives without exactly being told what to do or how to not do it, he just survived. That’s beautiful.

Here comes complication immediately after birth, the new life cries and cries till he’s made to realise that it is abnormal to cry in this world and then he’s pacified—silenced—with a breast milk. Liberty to do as he wishes is withdrawn from him by manipulation, life becomes ugly. And at this point, the struggle to adulthood begins.

The life that lived by itself in the womb hence begins to struggle to fit in an external world as he is told what he should and should not do. This, particularly, is where all human’s madness is birthed. Most of his philosophies are ingrained into him by his parents, the struggle they fought their whole life, sugarcoated as experience, is imparted into the child as in corrections, culture, morals, and heritage. And worst of it all, the things learnt from the society he is born into.

And as he grows, he begins to find his way according to how he has been patterned to live so as to conform to the philosophies that has been ingrained in him. If he was born in a religious home, he begins to struggle to fit to the beliefs of his family—the doctrines of his religion. One continues in this course and become even more fanatical than how they were taught while another finds his course elsewhere, after has been so much confused by the don’ts and dos of some god he cannot see.

The little grown child becomes a rebel for adding extras, excesses, to the damages these philosophies have brought him. He struggles to fit in the world that does not have the same values that he does. He struggles to extricate himself from “the home training” because the “how to live” that he was taught at home was based on the way his parents viewed life in their time; and this does not exactly correspond to the way life at the moment is for him or at the places he has been to. His struggle remains in a loop. So, it becomes true to him what Mark Manson says in his book, The subtle act of not giving a F*uck, “Travel is a fantastic self-development tool, because it extricates you from the values of your culture and shows you that another society can live with entirely different values and still function and not hate themselves”. A truth we cannot disprove. Some communities go about naked and they don’t rape eachother. Hence, indecent dressing is not the real cause of rape.

Your philosophy is your problem. Mine is my problem. The reason why everything threatens you and me—our philosophy, our problem. Our philosophy is the culprit. Only if we all could get a hold of it and strangle it in the neck till life falls out of it, then we would be free. But then this is quite impossible to do. One cannot exclusively live without a sense of value, moral or way of life—we cannot function without believing in something. This is why one cannot exactly be without a problem and will kill us—it’s killing us. We handpicked our own devils growing up, some was ingrained into us under the guise of care and protection.

I wouldn’t have struggled with masturbation if it was normal to me as drinking water and have not learnt that it was bad. You wouldn’t have struggled with saying what’s on your mind and expressing your feelings and emotions to a man as a woman if you were not particularly taught that it’s “boys stuff” to chase and that it makes a woman appear a slut when she does. Everyone would love to be explicit about sex talks if growing up there existed no cocoon around the topic in particular. Instead, we are rather superficially prudish and fundamentally kinky, making a face, a façade, and hence, we struggle our entire life to fit. We calculate the things we say before we say them so that we don’t come off rude, improper, immoral and out of place; leaving us perplexed, confused, depressed and all that’s related to psychological breakdown. Rather than being descriptive we evaluate—not detailed. We don’t want to offend the out listener(s) who expect better from us.

Fuck morals, fuck standards. Fuck everything that makes right and wrong. We made good and bad of everything that is good and bad. I agree more with science, the physical laws of nature, than culture itself—you cannot alter nature. No human suggested its design. Humans are strange and fallible. Culture is a making of human. Culture may, therefore, be flawed because it is proposed by an imperfect being, whose perfections and imperfections are a function of what he was taught by another imperfect being—his parents, grandparents, forefathers, society, and religious leaders.

This is when you have become a grown-up, when you have stripped yourself completely off the philosophies that you were taught and have come to a realization of what you fundamentally desire—your beliefs, whether religious or not, your philosophies about life, etc.—and you genuinely, and straightforwardly act them out without exactly apologizing to anyone, seeking approval of any kind or holding anyone, but you, responsible for whatever devils and angels you are now choosing to torment you and accepting the general physical laws of nature which also includes that everything is vanity and that all must die—living and non-living. This is when adulthood is complete. The little light from the womb now is big.

Life is a mess, a conclusion we must all come to at some point in life whether or not we want it, whether or not we desire to. And by mess, I mean vanity. Nothing is exactly worth the terrifying checks and balances; death is the only inevitable just the rest are uncertain. Friendship and relationships, uncertain. Health, uncertain. Good morals and philosophies, uncertain. All man must die, rich and poor, healthy and unhealthy; but when, too? Uncertain.

Meanwhile, legacy, we tell ourselves we’re building, a lie that helps us find sleep at night, while our struggle awaits us the next day. Legacy is vanity, all will come to an end one day, not as in rapture according to religion, but as a function of demolition and civilization—nothing lasts forever. Adulthood is acknowledging these things and choosing to not commit suicide anyway.

Yours with love,

Hagios A. Akins

See also:

• Radical Honesty 3: Extricate The Hypothetical You From The Real You
• What Will People Say?