Lao was troubled. Even in countries where there is no mass hunger, there is anomie. Mass silent despair. Even amidst plenitude and excess. Lives lived with no sense of purpose. From school to university then to the workplace. Working to earn a living, then to pay the mortgage, then to raise children. Then what? Where does it all lead? What is the purpose of all that energy, all that fire, all that effort, all that love, all that rage, all that chaos, all that dreaming?
Emptiness and absence of religion. Humiliation and no sense of redemption. Just work and television and sex and entertainment. Loves that fail. Marriages that die. Hopes that perish with the onset of adulthood. Knowledge that drives away the freshness of innocent dreaming. The joy of freedom that shrinks into the fear of being. Cynicism and despair. The fear of old age and the fear of dying. The perplexity of youth. The fear of losing one’s youth. The terror of accumulating wrinkles. The decaying of the teeth. The falling out of the hair. The inevitable decline. The thickening of the waistline, the bloating of the belly, the loss of youth’s vigour and freshness. The endless battles in the marketplace, the offices, the corporations, the rat race. The endless repetition of waking up in the morning, going to work, coming back, sleeping, waking up again, on and on, with no destination to make sense of it all, nothing that adds up to some redeeming whole, or goal.
A life is seldom a work of art. There is no sense of achievement in having made it, of having shaped it, or of it having a meaning and a value beyond itself, a value to others, something that shines beyond mortality.
Why go on living? How often does living seem like a finely drawn out ritual of humiliation and meaninglessness? All our intelligence, all our achievements, all our efforts, our schemes and plans, our designs, all that obeying of the laws and dictates of society, all that compromise between our secret selves and public selves, where does it all lead, what monument does it crystallise, into what light does it resolve? Why does there have to be emptiness after so much presence in the world? Why does it all have to end in a grave with an inscription which, more or less, says: ‘I too have loved, suffered, and been wretched, been successful and neurotic, been confused and despairing, in Arcadia’?