Illusions and Lies

7:45 pm I sat watching passerbys in Chinatown after 2 beers and an hour and a half of stalling, waiting for my dinner partners to arrive. My mood was generally pretty poor because of the constant reminder of time and the inevitability of it ending. I wondered to myself why when everything is going so well, am I feeling so poorly. But, out of the grey cold cloud that was hovering over my being I realized that it was so that I could think deeper and realize things that I have failed to understand.

I have made a lot of decisions in my life that I believed were right because in my belief system they make sense. However, I wonder how much of my belief system is an illusion. We are born in a culturally clad world, where at first breath we are placed into the framework of our life. Then we are brought up within a veiled world where we are taught to believe in someone else’s beliefs. These beliefs constitute how we see the world. Everything from the way we feel about ourselves to the way we feel about things have been influenced and crafted by the experiences and social dynamics of our life. How many ideas have we had on our own and why are we in constant search of things and emotions that make us feel connected with humanity? And why are people who don't buy into the main schema of beliefs marginalized. It's because people are caught in their own illusions that don't allow them to see anything but it.

Love, hate, nationalism, race, and beauty are all illusions. Illusions that are made real enough by our conscious and subconscious minds that it almost fails to grasp on its own constitution. Why do we feel? The only answer that rang true to me was because we are born alone and without the ability to truely relate to what or who someone is. Some people will talk about empathy for the human condition and how it is central to humanity. But in reality it is all bologna. There are numerous cases in modern history where the failure to acknowledge the human condition for one's own personal reasons have rang a lot harder and clearer than compassion and empathy. Think of something as serious as the nuclear bomb, or as simple as universal healthcare. If we as humans were as empathetic and "good" as people think why do we destroy ourselves?

Now back to love, our inability to feel someone else, to really feel them and acknowledge them as we acknowledge our own life is what draws us to love. It draws us to do things that we hope connect us to someone else more than we are connected to our cell phones or to our family, in which we had not choice. However, what happens when love is unrequited; the startling realization that we really are lonely in the world. And that so called connection that we thought we had, really was an illusion that we created ourselves. That is why it hurts so bad, because it is like looking in the mirror and realizing that everything good you had in life was a dream and that the only thing that you know for certain, or at least you hope you do, is that you are alive.

Now, I am not saying that love or emotion is a bad thing. An illusion that can fill the void left by our supreme loneliness is more than anything that we have. However, I am saying that we are looking for love and emotion to fill the emptiness of knowing that we are alone. An illusion is strong and most of the times it is better to be in an illusion than left in the cold cold world.