Life is a short term visa, with varied answers to our questions

The world's population is 8.1 billion in 2024. While that is a humungous number of people, what remains eternally true is that every single one of us is on a short-term visa on this planet. No exceptions. While that is stating the obvious, it raises the question, what then makes life interesting and different for each one of us? 

There is possibly no straight-forward answer to this question. There are too many factors at play in understanding or even attempting to understand, the reality of our existence while we are around. Here are a few to consider:

• The family that we are born into.
• The education we receive.
• The financial resilience we build to fight life.
• The emotional maturity to handle the vagaries of life.
• The professional hardships we have to negotiate.
• The enormous disparity between the haves and the have-nots.
• The incredible diversity in thought and action in each human being.
• The differences in interpreting the same stimuli.
• The social quotient that we establish (or do not establish) i.e., network of people we know.
• Credibility and integrity which is a direct outcome of our own actions/inactions.
• Our religious beliefs.
• Our political outlook.
• Our diverse interests in various spheres - music, art, sports, history, science, finance etc.
• ... and many more.

This is indeed a very long list of attributes that go into answering the above complicated question of each one of us trying to figure out the relevance/meaning of our life. Why is there no standard answer to this question? Here's my take:

1. There is no template to any of us or to anyone's life.
2. There is no planned outcome for anybody.
3. Man supposes, God disposes.
4. The ability to react vs the ability to respond has no consistency across human beings.
5. Ego massaging for most human beings has no limit to it.
6. Life has no guarantees, for anyone.
7. Further, life does not provide the assurance of being nice/good to you, just because you are a good person on your own. Life events, especially the bad ones, do not discriminate between good and bad people.
8. Modern technology has its own impact on our psychological thinking, social maturity (FOMO), health (physical, mental, emotional), and other abstract parts of our lives.
9. Lack of conversation or deep conversations amongst human beings i.e., texting is not real communication.
10. Instant gratification

While these 10 points are not exhaustive per se, they perhaps provide pointers to look at what is it that we can/should control, if at all. In many ways, the age-old practices of meditation, introspection, contentment and belief in oneself are perhaps the kinds of tools that we need to apply in finding our own answers. 

After all, a few decades after we are gone, we will be a photograph on a wall somewhere, barely anyone would remember us, and the world will go on. Hence, while we are on a short-term visa here on planet Earth, simplifying our life's complexities is perhaps the one thing we can realistically attempt.

Just one of those blogs, I guess, that may not have concrete answers and may raise more questions than answers. As Mark Twain famously wrote, ''the two most important days of your life are the day you are born and the day you figure out why''.