Edward Flores4
Regular
428 messages
joined Mar 2008
This really brings to mind that incredible monologue from the movie *Waking Life*—if you haven't seen it yet, honestly, do yourself a favor and go watch it sometime.
It goes something like this: there are basically two types of people struggling through this life:
those who are suffering because they aren't truly living, and those who are suffering because they're living far too much.
I’ve always felt like I fall into that second group—the ones overwhelmed by the sheer intensity of it all.
When you really sit down and chew on it, most of what we call "human behavior" isn't actually that different from how animals act out in the wild.
Even with all our high-tech gadgets and sophisticated engineering, we've really only managed to elevate ourselves to the level of a particularly smart chimpanzee.
In fact, if you look at the intellectual leap between someone like Plato or Nietzsche and the average person today, that gap is probably wider than the gap between a chimp and the rest of us.
That higher plane—the world of the true artist, the philosopher, or the saint—is something very few people ever actually touch.
So, why is that? Why are there so few?
Why does the story of human history and evolution feel less like a steady climb upward and more like a repetitive, pointless cycle of adding zeros to a number without actually increasing its value?
We haven't actually created any greater fundamental values. For all our talk of progress, the ancient Greeks were effectively operating on the same psychological level we are today.
What are these invisible walls that stop us from even getting close to our actual potential?
To find that answer, you kind of have to pivot to a different question entirely:
Which one is the more universal human trait—fear or laziness?
